Réflexions : Théorie sociale de la communication: Numéro 6

Table des matières

Présentation

La nouvelle économie et l'ancienne
Pierre Blouin

Le bibliothécaire, l'arbre de connaissance et la médiathèque virtuelle (d'après un film de Éric Rohmer)
Pierre Blouin

A Political Economy of Librarianship?
William F. Birdsall

MegaMetaphorics : Re-Reading Globalization, Sustainability, and Virtualization as Rhetorics of World Politics
Timothy W. Luke

Si c'est un homme
Primo Levi

Comptes rendus

Yves Lavertu, Jean-Charles Harvey, Le combattant. Montréal, Boréal, 2000
Alain Lacombe

"Anti-Negroponte: Thinking about Cybernetic Subjectivity in Digital Being and Time,"
Timothy W. Luke

Présentation

Un numéro d'HERMÈS avec un peu de retard... c'est la norme. Un numéro d'HERMÈS avec beaucoup de retard... c'est un disque rigide qui flanche. Et les copies de sécurité alors ! Hum ! Oublié...
Mais un nouveau numéro avec une nouvelle présentation. J'espère qu'elle vous plaira.

Voici un numéro qui était en grande partie terminé depuis un bon mois. Vous pouvez le lire, le savourer peu-être. Un prochain HERMÈS verra le jour dans les deux mois qui viennent. Le prochain portera sur les questions de la bibliothéconomie et de la société de l'information, de la mondialisation et du conservatisme. Nos thèmes habituels quoi.

Vous remarquerez en lisant le sommaire du présent numéro, qu'il est surtout question dans cette sixième mouture d'économie politique, mais d'économie politique de la bibliothéconomie, comme William F. Birdsall nous y introduit. Pierre Blouin continue dans cette vague en s'interrogeant sur la nouvelle économie et de ses rapports avec l'ancienne, et il propose aussi, dans un second texte, une interrogation très intéressante sur les sciences de l'information. Timothy Luke propose une analyse des plus perspicace de l'économie mondiale. Ce texte, je ne le cacherai pas, j'aurais aimé en être l'artisan. Mais, l'important c'est qu'il soit publié ici dans HERMÈS. Il nous propose aussi un texte critique de Negroponte, texte déjà publié en anglais, et que nous reprenons ici pour les lecteurs d'HERMÈS. Il y aura d'autres textes de Tim Luke qui seront publiés dans un avenir rapproché dans HERMÈS.

Un seul autre compte rendu est disponible dans ce numéro. Mais il est important. Il faut réfléchir de manière sérieuse sur cet individu qu'est Jean-Charles Harvey, sur son oeuvre et sa vie. Dans un Québec des plus conservateur, il a réussi de peine et de misère à défendre ses idées, il a réussi à les publier, à les rendre disponibles au citoyen « libre » du Québec. Alain Lacombe nous propose un compte rendu d'une biographie de Harvey.

Enfin je me permet d'inclure dans ce numéro un poème de Primo Levi qui figure au tout début de Si c'est un homme. Ce livre relate son expérience dans les camps nazis durant la dernière guerre mondiale.

Bonne lecture et merci pour vos commentaires.

Roger Charland

La nouvelle économie et l'ancienne

Pierre Blouin

– La question, dit Alice, est de savoir si vous pouvez obliger les mots à vouloir dire des choses différentes.

– La question, répondit Humpty Dumpty, est de savoir qui sera le maître, un point c'est tout.

Lewis Carroll, Au-delà du miroir, Les aventures d'Alice, 1872

Peu de gens parlent actuellement de ce qu'on nomme la nouvelle économie en termes de discours et de mythologie. Pourtant, on ne peut que constater que ce sont d'abord les discours qui la font et qui la maintiennent en place. Qu'il nous suffise de voir et de lire ce que nos dirigeants économiques et politiques nous destinent chaque jour. Nos leaders professionnels n'échappent pas non plus à la règle.

L'expression est née sans que ne soit jamais démontrée ni prouvée son existence tangible. Au-delà du constat pur et simple d'une augmentation quantitative des échanges électroniques, et des apprentissages divers qui les accompagnent, y a-t-il une transformation qualitative et significative de notre économie ? En quoi la nouvelle économie, dite du savoir, diffère-t-elle radicalement de l'ancienne ?

La nouvelle économie semble consister d'abord en un prolongement de l'autoroute de l'information, ce leitmotiv qui s'était imposé de la même façon et qui a fini par disparaître au profit du e-commerce. C'est d'abord ce qui explique son pouvoir de fascination sur l'imagination des décideurs économiques et politiques. Les sciences de l'information se réclament elles aussi de cette économie qui semble confirmer leurs plus belles théories.

Un fait indéniable est qu'on préfère l'utopie facile et technicienne à l'analyse scientifique et claire des choses. Qu'on se souvienne de McLuhan et des médias « chauds/froids » dans les années 70. Comme si on redécouvrait le monde chaque fois, un nouveau discours mythique prend la place d'un autre et chaque fois, le monde savant et scientifique se complaît dans la séduction de la vague.

Et pourtant, que d'études, de rapports et d'analyses sur l'ordre de la communication sont ainsi négligés, voire simplement oubliés… La nouvelle économie est aussi une autre étape dans le recouvrement de la mémoire. Cette fois, les théoriciens de la communication s'allient avec l'économie et adoptent une approche globale de la société, pour nous proposer une élaboration des réseaux de communication comme fondement de l'économie et de la société civile. Ne serait-ce pas plutôt l'économisme comme nouvel intégrisme qui fait ainsi surface ? Depuis longtemps déjà, l'économisme énonce des vérités absolues et avec le nouvelle économie, il croit avoir trouvé sa réalisation prophétique. Avec son cortège de fusions-acquisitions et de héros entrepreneurs, cet économisme apparaît comme triomphant dans l'air du temps présent.

Si on veut entendre la nouvelle économie simplement en termes de capacités de liaison ou d'information accrues, voire de commerce électronique, alors délaissons le discours mythocratique de ses promoteurs. Il est évidemment certain que cette nouvelle économie transforme tous les rapports de base, mais pas dans le sens de leur renouvellement structurel. Elle les transforme dans le sens de leur ADAPTATION à un nouveau contexte technologique et économique. Les finalités de l'économie restent fondamentalement les mêmes: ce sont celles du néo-libéralisme en expansion. Bien sûr les individus y gagnent en autonomie et en flexibilité, mais pas toujours et pas nécessairement pour le mieux. On valorise d'abord le savoir et les compétences seulement pour mieux performer ou pour mieux vendre, pour produire plus.

En bibliothéconomie, par exemple, on ne cesse de souligner l'importance de plus grandes habiletés en intermédiation face à l'usage du Web. Ce qui implique une plus grande attention portée aux contenus et à leur traitement. Or, tout cela relève non pas du domaine technique, mais du domaine le plus traditionnel, à savoir l'art ET la science du traitement de la documentation (indexation, catalogage, pratiques d'acquisition, etc.) La technique représente un savoir parmi d'autres, le plus omniprésent certes, mais qui devrait rester subordonné à une théorie générale de la discipline. Ce n'est pas parce qu'on rebaptise les collations ou les descriptions de documents par le terme de métadonnées qu'on réinvente une science. Ce n'est pas parce qu'on parle de valeur ajoutée qu'on « bonifie » l'apport théorique ou professionnel du service. La valeur ajoutée vaut en tant que variable économique dans un système économique donné. Elle peut signifier la mise en valeur économique de l'information ou encore son inclusion dans une marge bénéficiaire; à la limite, toute forme de traitement de l'information est une valeur ajoutée. L'expression joue en quelque sorte le rôle d'un artifice, sa plus forte connotation étant celle de la rentabilité économique. La notion de valeur ajoutée soulève le débat sur l'utilité réelle des biens, et sur celle de l'information en ce qui nous touche ici.

L'analyse de la valeur semble trouver une origine dans la Value Analysis ou Value Enginering des années 60, qui était, selon l'économiste Michael Shanks, un outil bien plus psychologique que statistique. « Where network analysis, for example, studies a process, value analysis studies the product. It seeks to study the function of the product. – whether it be a submarine or a screw-thread – to see ehether this function can be equally or better performed in cheaper ways (…) In this sense this is no more than conventional «cost-reduction» scientifically applied. » (1)

On comprend de plus en plus que le discours mythologique sur la technologie fait qu'on prend le contenant pour une forme de contenu, et qu'on le fonde en savoir autonome. Autre exemple: la « maison intelligente », qui transforme les activités élémentaires de la vie quotidienne en les QUANTIFIANT, et d'abord en les qualifiant de lourdes et de « non humaines », d'embarrassantes et de dégradantes. La prouesse est que le tout est présenté comme une libération de l'individu, alors que cette maison est une résidence d'handicapés physiques. Mais le plus intéressant, sans doute, reste le phénomène de SÉCURISATION derrière ce modèle technologique, exactement comme dans le cas du cellulaire. Les masses ultra-technologisées ont besoin de la technologie comme d'un gage de sécurité.

Par un glissement de sens un peu analogue, la nouvelle économie est d'abord la Communication érigée en tout économique et social. Mais le hic, c'est que la Communication elle-même est déjà un mythe. Comme l'expliquait Baudrillard, « Il paraît difficile de parler de la communication parce que c'est déjà un stéréotype pur et simple, comme le furent en leur temps la consommation et la production. À partir du moment où Marx est venu dire ce qui se cachait derrière la production, elle a cessé d'être un stéréotype. On a cessé d'en parler en termes naturalistes, humanistes, idéalistes, pour en parler d'une autre façon. » (2)

La nouvelle économie est peut-être la plus puissante manifestation du discours utopique sur le technique. Cette dernière se présente non seulement comme le fondement de la société, mais également comme celui de la subjectivité individuelle et collective. À cet égard, la nouvelle économie joue un rôle exemplaire : comme le disait déjà Louis Quéré, le réseau technologique a perdu son caractère de lien pragmatique de communication pour s'imposer comme LE réseau global et institutionnalisé des échanges. Le réseau devient le réseau des entreprises. Même mieux, il y a osmose entre innovation corporative et innovation sociale. (3)

En fait, la nouvelle économie n'aurait de nouveau que cette opération de remplacement des canaux de communication anciens par de nouveaux canaux qui répondent mieux aux exigences nouvelles de l'économie de marché. Dominique Wolton écrivait récemment, en parlant de la globalisation économique : « Le résultat probable de cette extension sans fin de l'information ? Une rationalisation de la communication, comme il y eut rationalisation du travail au XIXième siècle, entraînant certes une augmentation de la productivité, mais à un prix humain, social et politique très élevé. Si la technique multiplie les possibilités d'échange, c'est au prix d'une inévitable standardisation dont l'école de Francfort a eu l'intuition (…) Aucun système technique n'a jamais donné naissance à un modèle de société ; c'est même tout le contraire : plus il y a de systèmes d'information automatisés, plus il faut des lois pour éviter les abus de la communication. » (4)

L'avènement de cette normalisation de la communication affecte non seulement l'économie, mais tout notre mode d'être, toute notre relation au monde et à la connaissance. Apprendre est au cœur de la performance, répète-t-on. L'apprentissage est, et a toujours été, une condition essentielle au travail. Aujourd'hui, ce n'est plus une activité séparée. Chez les employés, l'application des compétences doit se mesurer à l'aide d'indicateurs de performance. Standards, mesures, performances : autant de notions de l'industrie lourde, de la plus pure économie industrielle classique, qui se voient transférées à des domaines jusque là exempts de telles mesures. L'histoire de l'économie capitaliste montre l'importance de l'évaluation et de la quantification des résultats. Toute forme d'économie fondée sur cette chose abstraite qu'est l'argent (et son accumulation, son calcul, ses techniques) ne peut être qu'une économie de l'information et des savoirs pragmatiques. Les économistes ont défini l'homo oeconomicus en fonction d'un individu CONNAISSANT parfaitement ses besoins et qui pouvait les mesurer, en mesurer la satisfaction, qui démontrait une rationalité dans la gestion de ces besoins. Durant la Grande Dépression des années 30, lorsque la consommation baissa dramatiquement, la psychologie, l'anthropologie et la sociologie furent mises à contribution pour « étudier » les masses, leurs comportements et leurs « besoins ». C'est par là même qu'on a aussi défini et conceptualisé ces disciplines en vue de leur transmission académique.

C'est donc dire la place centrale qu'occupe la connaissance dirigée dans toute économie, mais surtout dans celle de marché, où la planification prend la forme de mesures et de calibrage constant de l'offre et de la demande. La Bourse représente à cet autre égard un modèle exemplaire. L'expansion commune du télégraphe et des chemins de fer au XIXème siècle doit énormément à celle de la spéculation boursière. Les deux ont en fait progressé en interaction. En 1867, Edward Callahan, opérateur de télégraphe, invente le « Stock Ticker », qui enregistre les cours et les prix sur un ruban ; ce prototype du ruban magnétique des ordinateurs de première génération restera en opération jusqu'à l'avènement du National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) en 1976… (5)

Les machines-outils qui apparaissent en même temps que l'industrialisation, comme les machines à coudre, les outils agricoles mécanisés, les machines à écrire, sont les premières formes de mécanisation du geste et du savoir-faire. L'ordinateur lui-même a été mis au point théoriquement au XIXième siècle par les travaux de George Boole, Charles Babbage et W. Stanley Jevons, lequel crée la machine logique en 1877. On constate ainsi une réelle continuité dans le développement des connaissances scientifiques, tant dans l'économie industrielle lourde que dans l'économie moderne axée sur le consommateur. Seuls les contextes et les milieux changent, et permettent à ces savoirs de se déployer avec plus ou moins d'aisance. Or, la nouvelle économie représente l'expression d'un contexte nouveau, débarrassé de tous les obstacles traditionnels empêchant, entre autres, l'immédiateté des communications et la spéculation libre de toute limitation. Le contexte a changé, mais le but et les objectifs de l'économie ne l'ont pas nécessairement fait.

Aujourd'hui, l'ère de la technoscience permet surtout de passer de la machine à relayer les muscles à celle à relayer le cerveau et ses opérations mentales. (6)

L'importance des connaissances a prévalu à tous les âges du développement du capitalisme. Cependant, à l'ère contemporaine, la nouvelle économie pense triompher grâce à la prééminence des TI (technologies de l'information), laquelle tient à la fois de la publicité, de la magie, des médias, des discours dominants, voire de la pure fascination. Parce qu'on parle tous de communication, on entrerait dans une phase post-capitaliste (même cette expression est tombée en désuétude; on préfère économie du savoir ou économie du don). La mystique du scientifique des années 50 et 60 avait créé une élite de la communication scientifique, qui préside à la naissance des sciences de l'information (ceci est l'objet d'une autre histoire, à venir). Dès cette époque, le «scientist» américain jouit de la même considération que le capitaine d'industrie du XIXième siècle.

Les TI font partie du grand projet de la nouvelle économie, elles en sont la pierre d'assise. Par delà le constat technologique, des consciences de plus en plus nombreuses s'interrogent aujourd'hui sur l'apport réel de ces TI dans le changement positif global de nos sociétés. Dans un manifeste collectif, des professeurs de l'université du Québec à Montréal et d'ailleurs interrogent l'idée d'université et de culture dans l'économie du savoir: «L'enjeu, écrivent-ils, est évident: la connaissance, tout comme la création, ne peuvent se développer que dans la mesure où elles sont affranchies de toute autre sphère de contrainte, quelle qu'en soit la nature: idéologique, religieuse, politique, économique…(…) Il est temps de mettre un frein à l'envahissement de tous les sujets de réflexion par un langage appartenant au domaine de la gestion (…) Déjà, l'expression « économie du savoir » suggère le sens limité d'une société de techniciens hautement qualifiées au service de l'impératif de compétitivité. Jusqu'où nous imposera-t-on ce langage ? Parlera-t-on d'une mère de famille performante ? D'une culture compétitive ? On parle bien déjà d'universités performantes.» (7)

La nouvelle économie place essentiellement le discours gestionnaire au cœur de nos vies, à tel point qu'on peut se demander si elle est au service de slogans médiatiques ou professionnels. La révolution des moyens de communication représente une différence qui ne doit pas éclipser la centralité de la question sociale et politique. Au contraire, c'est la réaffirmation de ce politique qui apparaît urgente après les conflits déjà éprouvés entre l'univers industriel et entrepreneurial et les gouvernants. Le cas de Microsoft est patent, mais il y aussi les débats sur les droits d'auteur, les droits de prêt en bibliothèque, le droit de protection de la vie privée, etc.

Parallèlement, se mettent en place de nouveaux services, issus de nouvelles entreprises dites «start-up» ou de nouvelles écoles de pensée, qui proposent une « restructuration » des paramètres économiques dans une perspective de mise en réseau technique. C'est encore en ce sens qu'on peut qualifier la nouvelle économie d'unidimensionnelle : l'éclatement des structures produit un «boom» qui ne profite qu'au secteur très relatif et fragilisable des services et de la commodification des biens (comme l'information). D'où, par exemple, les difficultés qu'éprouvent les nouvelles entreprises et la profusion des «day traders» en Bourse, qui profitent de cette fausse et temporaire création de richesses. Une telle manifestation diffère tout à fait de la création de richesses réelles, tangibles (justement qualifiées par rapport aux richesses intangibles de la nouvelle économie). Ce phénomènes distingue d'une expansion économique réelle. C'est une économie virtuelle au sens premier du terme, c'est-à-dire que l'image, la publicité et le marketing sophistiqué y jouent le premier rôle. La «start up» investit (plutôt joue) des millions en pub, alors tous s'y précipitent, parce que tous croient à cette nouvelle miraculée et à ses promesses, et elle se tire avec les résultats boursiers… (8)

Il ne faut pas oublier non plus que cette nouvelle économie est intimement liée à celle de la globalisation de l'économie traditionnelle. C'est une économie de multinationales, qui a en fait commencé avec les politiques américaines corporatives de l'investissement direct à l'étranger au cours des années 60 et 70. Une telle planification indirecte de l'économie fait en sorte que les coûts globaux de production de ces transnationales sont distribués et amortis à l'échelle mondiale. La main-d'œuvre est considérée comme une externalité et traitée comme telle. L'érosion des économies nationales et locales s'ensuit, et avec elle celle du tissu social dans son ensemble.

Donnons comme exemple de cette détérioration sociale une autre caractéristique bien particulière de la nouvelle économie: la passion du jeu. Les loteries et les jeux de hasard (concours, etc. ) acquièrent une sorte de dimension essentielle dans un système qui ne suffit plus à fournir les biens de base. La nouvelle économie ressemble ainsi à une économie de casino. Un cas typique est le jeu de Pokémon, qui fait dépenser aux parents des enfants (majoritairement de milieux pauvres) des sommes énormes, grâce à un marketing croisé et intégré, comme au cinéma hoolywoodien. Films, émissions de télévision, jeux vidéo et magazines, tout vend les Pokémon. Une industrie de plus de 6 milliards de dollars par an, qui encourage l'instantanéité de la gratification et qui reproduit le mécanisme de la consommation au niveau du jeu, selon Jacques Nantel, professeur aux HEC de Montréal et lui-même propagandiste de la nouvelle économie (Émission Les règles du jeu, Télé-Québec, 3 juin 2000). Ce qui est le plus grave et que la plupart des adeptes ne voient pas, c'est qu'on gagne à ce jeu en DÉTRUISANT l'autre, tous les autres. La sociabilité est l'inverse de la logique de ce jeu. À l'école, les enfants les plus entreprenants se mettent à « taxer » leurs confrères pour mettre la main sur les cartes les plus chères… Par tous ces canaux, la violence s'institutionnalise.

L'économie entendue dans ses dimensions sociales et éthiques, voilà qui sonne vraiment nouvelle économie. Pour l'instant, parlons de «booming economy», qui s'adresse à un consommateur de plus en plus géré et contrôlé. La nouvelle économie revivifie l'ancienne en la renouvelant, tout comme l'économie du début du XXième siècle a renouvelé celle du XIXième. On assiste en fait à une exacte répétition du «boom» économique du début du siècle passé: l'invasion de l'automobile, la construction des autoroutes et des banlieues, le développement des mégapoles conduisent à l'American Way of Life de l'après-guerre et à l'époque moderne. L'automobile acquiert son aura symbolique de par sa disponibilité aux masses. Elle se fait le symbole de la nouvelle technologie de l'époque, et de la nouvelle donne économique qu'elle permet de définir, de par la mobilité nouvelle qu'elle donne.

On a dit que la chimie a cédé la primauté à l'électricité dans ce vaste mouvement de changement, ce qui veut dire que la chimie, industrie lourde, physique, plutôt statique, a cédé le pas à une industrie de l'immatérialité, de la communication (essentiellement électrique), de l'énergie flexible, de la lumière (dans son sens métaphorique d'information également). La naissance de l'économie industrielle moderne à partir du taylorisme et des communications s'est faite de la sorte selon le même processus que note nouvelle économie. C'est General Motors, lui-même sauvé et pris en main par les Du Pont en 1922, qui avait absorbé la multitude des petits constructeurs automobiles indépendants en l'espace de deux seules années (1910-1912), allant jusqu'à acheter les lignes de tramways dans les années 20 et 30 pour mieux asseoir sa domination dans le marché de la liberté motorisée.

Du Pont (la méga-entreprise issue du XIXième siècle, modèle de la multinationale moderne) récupère General Motors (la nouvelle entreprise de voitures) au début des années 20, et s'assure de sa position dominante dans le marché des manufacturiers automobiles… Ces bouleversements résultent en une nouvelle économie de la production, en renouvelant l'ancienne…

L'explosion économique des années d'abondance est due à cette vision, lourdement subventionnée par les pouvoirs publics, d'une infrastructure technologique considérée comme une fin en soi, et surtout de la nécessaire et inévitable adaptation de la société et des institutions à cette « réalité ». » The 20s boom had cemented the idea in the American psyche that the best economy was an explosive technocentric economy. » (9)

L'automobile crée la vie de banlieue, et le remplacement des communautés vivantes, parfois turbulentes, des villes. On sait aussi que l'automobile a été une première forme d'évasion, non pas virtuelle, mais physique. Ce fut en tout cas une de ses justifications intimement ancrées dans la psyché collective américaine, et occidentale en général. Déjà on parle de déterritorialisation.

Il est intéressant de faire ce rapprochement entre l'économie de l'automobile et la nouvelle économie. Tout comme la banlieue est née de l'aventure immobilière, la nouvelle économie et son infrastructure technologique sont elles aussi liées à la spéculation, et non à un projet civique. La nouvelle économie est une économie planétaire de banlieue.

Plus tard, les années 50, 60 et 70 verront diverses tentatives de création d'un paradigme et d'un mythe de la nouvelle économie de la communication: la productique est une de celles-là. Le terme date de 1979, et est déposé par Philips Data Systems. Il ne touchait que les opérations de production classiques. En même temps naît le terme de télématique (suite au rapport Nora-Minc de 1978). Il touchait au télétraitement des données, au vidéotex et aux téléconférences. Il peut être considéré comme un prototype de l'Internet actuel. Plus significative est l'appellation « mercatique », proposée en 1973 par la Commission de terminologie française pour désigner l'ensemble des actions qui, dans une économie de marché, ont pour objectif de prévoir, de stimuler et de « renouveler les besoins des consommateurs », ainsi que de « réaliser l'adaptation continue de l'appareil productif et de l'appareil commercial d'une entreprise aux besoins ainsi déterminés ». (10)

Il n'est pas inutile non plus de parler ici de l'informatique dans ce grand processus de mécanisation des comportements et des besoins cher à la nouvelle économie. L'informatique a représenté dès son avènement un paradigme, un mode d'organisation économique et sociale autour de l'idée d'une efficacité technique. Le terme

« informatique » serait né en 1965. Ce sont des chercheurs soviétiques qui l'ont lancé officiellement, puis l'appellation a été reprise par les grandes écoles universitaires américaines en sciences de l'information qui naissent à cette époque. Il fait suite au concept trop limité d'«information retrieval». Il est intéressant de noter que l'ingénieur Philippe Dreyfus mentionne le terme dès 1962 dans un de ses écrits, en se référant à la

« science du traitement rationnel de l'information considérée comme le support des connaissances et des communications dans les domaines techniques, économique et social ». On y voit la prééminence inconsciente du technique et de l'économique sur le social, ce qui se développera en hyper-rationalité technologique avec le progrès technologique lui-même. (11)

Parallèlement, la nouvelle économie façonne une nouvelle définition du travail, qui devient une marchandise monnayable quels qu'en soient la qualité ou le sens. Le processus d'informatisation des tâches et de la production conduit inévitablement à accorder une grande importance à l'information, qui devient elle-même facteur de production. On aboutit à une valorisation de l'information en tant que secteur de production, à une économie de centres d'appels où les «money motivated people» et les «career minded individuals (no experience necessary)» sont prêts à tout pour gagner un salaire décent, dit normal. La gestion sociale minimale imposée par le modèle néo-économique reflète une « dématérialisation » du travail qui ne renvoie à rien d'autre que celle de la plus value et de ses raffinements (un certain Marx avait déjà exposé cela il y a un siècle et demi). Le centre d'appels est autant une usine à rendre de l'information qu'une usine à en créer.

Nous ne comprendrons rien à la nouvelle économie si l'on continue à la qualifier de « post-industrielle ». C'est une économie néo-industrielle, qui fait entrer l'économie industrielle dans un nouveau stade, celui du « savoir ». Il s'agit du savoir instrumental, du savoir comme technologie industrielle.

Questionnons-nous, par exemple, sur la prééminence des actifs dits immatériels dans le discours néo-économique : le concept de capital intellectuel, tant invoqué, ne renvoie-t-il pas à la mutation capitale qu'a subie l'économie du début du XIXième siècle, lorsque la source de la richesse est passée de la terre (pour François Quesnay) au travail des hommes (pour Adam Smith et Jean-Baptiste Say) ? Transformation d'une richesse matérielle, visible, en une richesse non visible, immatérielle, fondée sur la mesure et les biens (sur le salariat). (Lire Albert Jacquard, J'accuse l'économie triomphante, Calmann-Lévy, 1995). En fait, cette transformation a changé le savoir-faire de l'artisan en gestes mécanisés adaptés à la vie de l'ouvrier en usine. La nouvelle économie est un effort pour continuer cette mutation ; cette fois, c'est le travail intellectuel qui est visé. La puissance des technologies du virtuel et de ses appareils de gestion peut faire en sorte de ramener le travail intellectuel au même niveau que le travail physique tel que défini par Smith au début du XIXième siècle. Il y aurait donc une répétion logique à l'intérieur de l'évolution constante de la rationalisation du travail et de la production.

Si cette nouvelle économie ressemble tant à l'ancienne par ses structures de base, il faut cesser de l'invoquer à tout propos, surtout dans les discours de défense des idées. Prenons-la pour ce qu'elle est. La question de fond qui est en cause, et qu'on soulève trop rarement, est culturelle. Notre culture est profondément imprégnée (obsédée même) par la l'innovation technologique comme fin en soi, la capacité technologique devenant un but en soi. Les robots du MIT vont ainsi pouvoir s'occuper des personnes âgées, dixit leurs créateurs… La nouvelle économie trouve là peut-être sa vraie signification, celle d'une économie pour elle-même, une économie de jeux virtuels, de courte durée et de temps instantané. Tout y est augmenté, la fascination y joue sur tous les plans. L'accès à l'information devient la caractéristique MORALE d'une bonne intégration, comme l'argent et le contrat commercial ont acquis leur légitimité morale à la Renaissance. Les classes deviennent elles-mêmes informationnelles, les info-riches et info-pauvres sont les nouvelles démarcations de cette société du savoir.

Pourtant, parmi ces nouvelles idiosyncraties, ce qui nous manque est une classe info-critique. La circulation maximisée de l'information n'est pas la solution, puisqu'elle ait partie du problème. Pour quoi et pour qui la nouvelle économie ? Pour fournir à tous un surf continu sur cellulaire alors que la violence sociale ne cesse de croître et que les souffrants ne peuvent plus être soignés avec un minimum d'humanité ? Penser la nouvelle économie (et non plus la célébrer) est une tâche qui commence à se faire sentir, même dans les milieux de la nouvelle économie.

Pierre Blouin

Notes

(1) Michael Shanks, The Innovators: The Economics of Technology. London, Penguin Books, 1967, p. 207.

(2) « La difficulté de parler de la communication », in L'ordre communicationnel : les nouvelles technologies de la communication, enjeux et stratégies, François du Castel et al, La Documentation Française, 1989, pp. 35-40. Voir aussi « Du téléphone aux télécommunications multi-services : une nouvelle économie », Michel Volles, administrateur de l'INSEE, pp. 49-63. Titre prémonitoire, la nouvelle économie se fondant sur l'intégration des services multiples et de leur offre. L'auteur explique que le Minitel offrait aux Français une forme de marché en ligne adapté à leurs habitudes et leur culture, régi par la puissante DGT. Dix ans plus tard, on constate que c'est le modèle américain d'intégration planétaire qui l'a emporté, celui des offreurs de service, décentralisé et non dirigé.

(3) Louis Quéré, Des miroirs équivoques, aux origines de la communication moderne. Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 1982.

(4) Dominique Wolton, «Les fausses promesses de la société Internet », Le Monde Diplomatique, Juin 1999., p. 29.

(5) George P. Oslin, The Story of Telecommunications, Mercer University Press, 1992, pp. 192 et 314.

(6) Voir Ignacio Ramonet, «Nouvelle économie», Le Monde diplomatique, Avril 2000 Http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2000/04/Ramonet.e1.html

(7) L'étalon de la formation universitaire n'est pas le marché du travail «, Montréal campus, 5 avril 2000. Signé entre autres par Martine Beaulne, Michel Freitag, Guy Rocher, Jean Larose et des représentants étudiants.

(8) Lire les textes satiriques et instructifs de Pierre Lazuly, partuculièrement« Esclavage librement négocié », Http://www.menteur.com/chronik/980426.html « Les nouveaux entreprenautes », Http://www.menteur.com/chronik/000515.html « Petite leçon de gestion », Http://www.menteur.com/chronik/990215.html Pour une analyse économique et technique, lire Dean Baker, «The Myth of the New Economy», Dollars and Sense, March-April 2000, No 228, pp. 14-17.

(9) James H. Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1994.

(10) Christian Lassure, Vocabulaire anglais-français de la haute technologie. Paris, Ellipses, 1991, p. 20

(11) Idem, p. 19

Pour approfondir:

Paul Krugman,« Requiem for the New Economy : Millennial optimism confronts reality » in Fortune, November 10, 1997
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/1997/971110/fst5.html
Like every presidential election in the past 20 years, last week's contest was driven largely by economics--specifically, by public dismay over the economy's recent performance. What is strange about the near-hysterical public mood is that objectively, things aren't really that bad. Unemployment is nowhere near as high as in the early 1980s, and most forecasters think the economy either has already bottomed out or will do so in the near future. Yet the public is furious and bitter; it feels betrayed. Why?
The answer, surely, is that people feel that they had been led to expect better. Just a couple of years ago it was virtual dogma among business economists and the media that we had entered a new era, that of the so-called New Economy--an economy that would grow at unprecedented rates thanks to the magic of digital technology, that would no longer be subject to the vagaries of the business cycle, that would never again find its ability to expand hobbled by inflationary pressure. Even Alan Greenspan cautiously endorsed the New Economy doctrine. As belief in that doctrine spread, the stock market soared to dizzying heights, and the strength of the market only reinforced the sense of millennial optimism.
Yet even three or four years ago it was obvious to anyone who thought about it that there were, to say the least, some major problems with the whole New Economy idea. Conventional economic measures showed no sign at all of an increase in the economy's potential growth rate. From the middle of 1994 to the middle of 1997, real GDP grew at an annual rate of 2.8%; over the same period the unemployment rate fell from more than 6% to less than 5%. Since unemployment can't fall indefinitely, this suggested that the economy's long-run sustainable growth was considerably less than 2.8%--perhaps no more than 2%. And with a growth rate of not much more than 2%, inflation of less than 3%, and long-term interest rates of more than 6%, it was hard to see how profits could possibly grow fast enough to justify the level of stock prices.
The response of the New Economy enthusiasts to such dismal calculations was to insist that a dramatic acceleration of productivity growth had changed the rules. There was not a shred of statistical evidence for such an acceleration--but the statistics, the enthusiasts insisted, were missing the real story. And wasn't the combination of unexpectedly low inflation and high profits proof that something had changed for the better? Critics pointed out in vain that low inflation and high profits could be entirely accounted for by slow growth in wages--and that while workers had been cautious about demanding wage increases, this restraint could not be expected to last as labor markets became ever tighter.
The New Economy crowd also seemed to have failed to grasp the seemingly technical but actually crucial point that official measures of productivity, GDP growth, and inflation are not independent of one another. If productivity is understated by the official data, so is growth--by exactly the same amount. Even if there was unmeasured productivity growth, there was no reason to think that the economy could grow faster than it was already growing.
In short, the New Economy doctrine made no sense at all, and without that intellectual justification there was no way to regard the great stock market boom as anything other than a bubble. Yet as long as inflation stayed low and the market continued to rise, skeptical voices were ignored. (Nous soulignons HERMÈS)
So strong was the desire to believe, in fact, that even when inflation did begin to accelerate over the course of 1998, the general response was denial. The pundits and the business press insisted it was only a statistical blip. Even Greenspan seems to have been unwilling to face the facts--or perhaps to face the howls of outrage he knew would greet any rise in interest rates. And so the Fed waited until the evidence that inflation was back was unmistakable to everyone (except a few hundred die-hard Wall Street gurus).
By that time, it was impossible to manage a soft landing. When the markets woke up to reality, they panicked. And as millions of people watched their fortunes dwindle, they began cutting back with a vengeance: consumer spending spiraled downward. By late last year the Fed--alas, minus Greenspan, who averted the possibility of impeachment by resigning of his own accord--was backpedaling, frantically cutting interest rates in an effort to reverse the slump.
All signs point to an incipient recovery, and unemployment is unlikely to rise above 8%. But while the economic havoc could have been worse, the political fallout was devastating. Prosperity had been an essential lubricant of the Washington political process during the good years. A hot economy had allowed Congress and the President to offer a little bit to everyone. Once the good times stopped rolling, ideology ran rampant: Republican radicals demanded sweeping tax cuts and a return to the gold standard, while Democratic radicals demanded massive public works programs and import quotas. Moderates were caught in the crossfire. The result was a strange and ugly campaign.
The good news is that the U.S. economy remains fundamentally sound. Our ever resilient private sector is ready to bounce back; all it really needs are calm, sensible policies at the top. The big question is this: Can we really count on sensible policies from President-elect Perot?

Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy.Carl Shapiro et Hal R. Varian. Harvard Business School Press, 1998, 352 p.

Écrit par l'économiste en chef de la division antitrust du Justice Department américain, ce livre ne peut manquer d'être intéressant et d'offrir des points de vue plus réalistes que ceux des gourous à la Kevin Kelly. Les auteurs relativisent la nouveauté de la nouvelle économie en la plaçant dans son contexte historique. La revue The Economist écrit à propos du livre:

«Although the circumstances of a particular era may be unique, the economic principles that govern the exchange of goods in a liberal market economy are enduring. It is a truth, incidentally, which applies as much to competition regulators as it does to people trying to run technology business» ( The Economist, December 12, 1998, p. 7).

Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance. Larry Downes et Chunka Mui. Harvard Business School Press, 1998

En français sous le titre:

L'innovation irrésistible. Produits ou services : stratégies numériques pour dominer le marché. Paris, Village mondial, 1999

Écrit par deux consultants en information, l'un chez Andersen Consulting (première firme mondiale de services Internet en 1998), et l'autre chez McKinsey et Co. Le côté monstrueux de la nouvelle économie, avec une préface de Negroponte et une citation de Henry Adams, tirée de The Law of Acceleration de 1904, qui nous dit que la nouvelle mentalité collective entre désormais dans «une nouvelle phase sujette à de nouvelles lois». La nouvelle économie serait une tratégie fonctionnant sur le mode du bouleversement, du soulèvement. Plus de coûts marginaux, plus d'inventaires, plus de douanes, plus de gouvernements, plus de copies ni d'originaux (ni de droits d'auteur), plus de réglementations… Le paradis du digital prend forme dans ce modèle nouveau de biens et services. «A killer ap(plication) is a new good or service that establishes an entirely new category and, by being first, dominates it, returning several hundred percent on the initial investment» (p. 4). Toujours le même rêve de Rockefeller, de Carnegie ou de DuPont, donc.

La découverte des coûts de transaction de la firme corporative par Ronald Coarse il y a 60 ans, en 1937, est offerte comme explication de l'économie du cyberespace (p. 37). La figure de la page 45 est assez éloquente sur les coûts bancaires «sans succursale, sans employé, sans structure». Le but de l'économie moderne serait ainsi l'accélération de la rotation de l'argent. Lire surtout le chapitre 10, sur le territoire du cyberespace et la mentalité américaine.

À cet égard, on ne peut s'empêcher de penser au Plan Marshall (1947) et sa distribution «gratuite» aux vaincus de la production US pour faire tourner l'industrie US, grâce à une stimulation de l'économie sur le modèle de l'effort de guerre. En plus de cette ressemblance avec le momodèlenernet, le plan a aussi été la plus grosse opération de propagande au monde, surpassant de très loin ce qui s'est fait dans les pays communistes.

Enfin, «Killer apps are the Holy Grail of technology investors (…)». À lire comme pamphlet de revendications de la nouvelle classe technologique face à ses clients de grandes corporations traditionnelles qu'elle cherche à convaincre. «The World now runs on Internet time», dit Andrew Grove de Intel, paraphrasant presque Virilio. Encore mieux: «The best way to predict the future is to invent it » (Alan Kay).

Blur: the Speed of Change in the Connected Economy. Stanley Davis et Christopher Meyer.Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, © Ernst et Young, 1998

En français sous le titre :

Le paradigme du flou: vitesse, connectivité et immatérialité. Paris, Village Mondial, 1998

Ici, le vertige du profit érigé en philosophie se traduit par le flou généralisé. L'accélération de la richesse corporative et financière brouille notre vision des choses. On est dans l'ordre des théories du chaos et du fractal. Toujours le même mot d'ordre: face à ce futur inventé (Alan Kay, cité plus haut), adaptons-nous ! Éloge de la connectivité et de la vitesse, certes, mais aussi du désir et de sa satisfaction : «Manage the Supermarket like the Stock market». À savourer: le modèle du «marché de l'estomac» de Coca-Cola, qui voulait remplacert la mesure traditionnelle de la part de marché. On apprend que 60 onces de ce marché sont disponibles, contre 2 seulement appropriés par Coca-Cola… (p. 233).

Écrit par l'auteur de «Managing Corporate Culture» (Ballinger Publishing Co., 1984), qui traitait de la transition corporative américaine vers les années d'expansion néo-libérales.

Le bibliothécaire, l'arbre de connaissance et la médiathèque virtuelle (d'après un film de Éric Rohmer)
Pierre Blouin

« Sans l'ironie, le monde serait comme une forêt sans arbres ».
Anatole France, La vie littéraire, 1888

Depuis l'apparition de la science de l'information durant les années 60, le bibliothécaire est sans cesse préoccupé par son image publique et professionnelle. Beaucoup plus que le statut ou la compétence réelle, la question de l'image serait le talon d'Achille de cette profession. Du moins, c'est ce que nous laissent croire les discours qu'on lit dans le milieu. Quand une responsable de la technologie dans une bibliothèque publique écrit que la Charte résumée (Core Values Statement) de l'American Library Association représente un effort « to recast who we are in terms that are meaningful for our era », elle évoque deux notions centrales, en bibliothéconomie comme ailleurs : le sens et l'Histoire. (Karen G. Schneider, « Response to LJ John Berry's Editorial », Liste PLGNet, avril 2000). Redéfinir « ce que nous sommes » uniquement parce que les termes n'auraient plus de sens ou parce que les temps ont changé, ou parce que la mission de base de la bibliothéconomie aurait changé ?

La liberté intellectuelle (qu'on refuse d'inclure dans la Charte résumée) et le droit de connaître pour tous définis par Dewey seraient-ils périmés ? Quels termes exactement ont perdu toute signification « pour notre ère » ? Quels sont ceux qui en ont ? Fouillez un peu, et vous en trouverez bien qui sont tout prêts à servir. De nouveaux mots peuvent toujours servir à réduire la portée des anciens, comme c'est le cas avec cette déclaration qui vise à restreindre la portée de droits formulés à l'ALA depuis des décennies.

Cependant, on ne joue pas impunément avec les mots comme avec des décorations. Le mot construit notre pensée, il matérialise une attitude, une philosophie. Or, pourquoi tant d'attention est-elle accordée au « phrasing », aux vocables, aux modes, et non aux valeurs, au questionnement et au débat sincères ? Pourquoi refuser d'interroger et de revisiter les éléments de base de la profession, qui ne sont pas techniques ? Pourquoi continuer dans l'unique veine de la recherche opérationnelle et de ses définitions, alors qu'une vision d'ensemble et une synthèse manquent si cruellement ? Pourquoi reproduire de savantes et compliquées dissertations analytiques, alors qu'on a tant besoin de vision d'ensemble et de ponts avec les autres disciplines ?

Le texte de William Birdsall dans ce numéro d'Hermès, intitulé « For a Political Economy of Librarianship », constitue un exemple parfait, lumineux devrait-on dire dans le contexte actuel, de cette vision de pensée qui manque à la bibliothéconomie actuelle. Une pensée critique, comme on se plaît à le répéter dans les revues professionnelles ou les plans de cours, n'est pas qu'une critique entre nous, de l'intérieur, en circuit fermé, dans notre bulle : c'est une critique hors de la bulle, vers la bulle justement, une critique qui ne porte pas que sur les éléments techniques, convenus, empiriques mais qui s'adresse à la pensée de la bulle, à son idéologie.

Au fond, et cela dit sans malice, le discours actuel de la profession, très managérial (au point que l'on est fier d'être Knowledge Manager dans une entreprise de Start Up Accelerator, lu sur Biblio-Fr), le discours actuel fait penser à celui de Charles Sirois, ce Bill Gates québécois, ex-PDG de Téléglobe Canada et maintenant PDG de sa filiale Télésystèmes. Sirois commente le jeu dangereux du marché et remarque que « c'est cela, le marché. Que peut-on y faire ? C'est comme la mondialisation, elle est là. Je me dis qu'il vaut mieux en bénéficier plutôt que de la subir » (« Charles Sirois est heureux de la tournure des événements », Le Devoir, 26 février 2000).

Il y en a, en effet, qui subissent la mondialisation plutôt que d'en bénéficier. Les bibliothécaires, eux, comme beaucoup d'autres, ont décidé qu'ils allaient en bénéficier, quitte à y perdre leur chemise. Pourquoi pas, après tout ? Après une histoire tellement misérable, faite de main-d'œuvre féminine sous-payée et déconsidérée, le temps de la revanche semble arrivé une fois pour toutes. Et hop !dans les ligues majeures comme on dit au Québec. Enfin, de la reconnaissance, et pas n'importe laquelle : celle de la nouvelle économie. Il était temps.

Surtout, cependant, pas d'alarmisme ! Ce mot, qui fait tinter dans votre petite tête une sonnerie ou une sirène… d'alarme, désigne ce qui est vraiment inapproprié dans un univers où tout roule doucement, sans heurts, où tout ronronne si bien. Pas de débats de fond, pas de confrontations d'idées (sinon sur un mode feutré), pas de points de vue, pas de critique véritable (contrairement aux États-Unis, ou en France). Pourquoi diantre se faire « alarmiste » dans ce bucolique pâturage ?

La seule possibilité d'une critique véritable, qui nomme les choses par leur nom, est en soi une manifestation d'alarmisme. Retournons donc à nos moutons, pour les compter peut-être, avec le logiciel SATO d'analyse des occurrences dans un texte littéraire. Pas besoin de philosophie avec les moutons, direz-vous ? Eh bien justement non : les moutons ont leur philosophie bien à eux. Ils broutent, spéculent et sautent par-dessus les clôtures pour endormir les enfants (qui, eux, en profitent pour apprendre les rudiments de la pensée quantitative et sa recherche). Ne nous méprenons surtout pas ici : les moutons ne sont pas des idiots, ils sont même fort intelligents. Ils ne s'aperçoivent pas qu'en sautant ainsi, ils initient les étudiants, actuels ou futurs peu importe, à compter et à penser 1+1=2). Les moutons, comme leurs bergers, ont besoin de fondements philosophiques pour argumenter.

Loin de moi, bien sûr, l'idée d'assimiler bibliothécaires et moutons. Disons seulement que dans certains aspects de la vie intellectuelle, le bibliothécaire a un comportement moutonnier. Le mouton a ses codes, ses habitudes, et trop souvent (la plupart du temps, devrait-on dire) le bibliothécaire se refuse à considérer une autre façon de penser sa profession. Nous à Hermès, qui parlons littéralement chinois, sommes sur une autre planète, où l'alarmisme a atteint à coup sûr les proportions d'un vilain cauchemar…

Dans une réponse à Jim Zwaldo (« We don't need a philosophy of librarianship and information science – We're confused enough already », Library Quarterly, Vol. 67, no 2, 1997), Gary Radford et John Budd (« We do need a philosophy of LIS – We're not confused enough : a response to Zwaldo », idem) écrivent, en parlant de la méthode empirique comme unique moyen de recherche (positiviste) en bibliothéconomie :

The key to study, research, discourse, is a more fundamental understanding. This is achieved by delving into the nature of knowledge and knowing into the field (…) Thus the critique of positivism is necessary first in order to raise awareness that alternatives exist and, more important, that the idea of an alternative world view makes sense. If the tenets of positivism remain implicit and taken for granted, then discussion ceases. (p. 317).

Qu'est-ce qu'une approche positiviste ? C'est une approche qui prend la méthodologie scientifique pour seule valable, qui se cantonne dans l'analyse, la description, l'objectif. Tout commentaire et toute analyse autre relèvent de l'éditorial ou de l'opinion, donc sont secondaires. Ce qui donne une somptueuse suite de tableaux détaillés et de textes secs (intellectuellement parlant) comme un sol de conifères par une chaude journée d'été. Très joli, peut-être, édifiant pour leurs auteurs, mais artéfacts de la pensée, « infertilisables »…

Radford et Budd constatent que la philosophie ne manque pas à la bibliothéconomie, mais que sa pratique et sa perspective deviennent, dans les termes de Thomas Khun, « invisibles » (p. 316). Invisibles, c'est-à-dire non dites, non formulées, toujours implicites et naturalisées, et cela, pour tous les sujets abordés. Il y a, par exemple, des discours différents de celui de l'impératif technologique. On peut se faire l'avocat inconditionnel de l'informatisation et des réseaux comme on peut aussi choisir de défendre des valeurs politiques et sociales de service, d'emploi, d'accès universel à toutes les sources, et ce, tant au niveau du gestionnaire que du théoricien (surtout à ce dernier niveau à vrai dire, qui touche le discours des formations). Qui a fait la promotion d'Internet comme instrument rédempteur, qui a confondu Internet avec une bibliothèque (une simple analyse formelle suffit à invalider un tel rapprochement), sinon le bibliothécaire lui-même ? Il l'a fait durant la période d'expansion de cette technologie, pensant se positionner avantageusement et espérant y gagner au change, face aux instances de décision économiques. On sait désormais qu'il a eu tort, et qu'il a même plutôt nui à sa cause. Mettant tous ses œufs dans le même panier, le bibliothécaire doit aujourd'hui confronter son public et réaffirmer sa mission (voir notre texte sur le rapport Benton dans le précédent numéro). Les principes véritables de la profession de bibliothécaire incluent certes la dimension technologique (ils l'ont toujours fait), mais sont ailleurs que dans la Technologie comme discours.

Ce qui se passe à l'heure actuelle en bibliothéconomie comme partout ailleurs ressemble au modèle de pensée économiste dans lequel on veut enfermer la société vivante. La réduction aux concepts et aux formulations quantifiables est séduisante, elle simplifie et permet une manipulation théorique des paramètres sociaux (comme le PNB, le standard de vie, le taux de chômage ou de croissance). Ces paramètres en viennent à être plus importants que la réalité elle-même, plus importantes que le contexte. C'est ce qu'on appelle la pensée technologique, la réduction des choses à l'unidimensionnel de la machine. C'est pourquoi d'ailleurs l'approche franchement managériale et corporative fascine les sciences de l'information.

Pourquoi diable serait-on obligé de s'infliger la lecture laborieuse et le plus souvent inutile, non pertinente, des revues professionnelles de bibliothéconomie (surtout québécoises) pour faire de la bibliothéconomie (pour aimer en faire) ? N'y aurait-il pas autre chose à dire ?

Même les thématiques professionnelles reflètent cette reddition face à une pensée consistante. Prenons, entre de multiples exemples, celui de la défense de l'alphabétisation. « Alors que dans certains milieux [qui ne sont assurément pas de bons milieux ], plusieurs tentent de définir la valeur de l'information, on a tendance à assumer que la valeur des mots ou que l'alphabétisation ne sont plus à démontrer. », écrit France Bouthillier dans Documentation et bibliothèques (« La valeur des mots ou l'alphabétisation des adultes », janvier-mars 1999, Vol. 45, no 1, p, 3). Alors que des intellectuels (autres que ceux de l'académie ou de la profession) tentent de définir la base d'un mot qui est central à une pratique qui se veut scientifique, le bon peuple, lui, manque de mots, puisqu'il y a relation directe entre analphabétisme et pauvreté. Conclusion : délaissons donc la vaine spéculation et engageons-nous à alphabétiser par la science de la bibliothéconomie. L'économie du savoir est constamment invoquée dans ce cas pour appeler le bibliothécaire à ses préoccupations morales et “ sociales ” en ce domaine.

On oublie toutefois deux ou trois choses :

L'alphabétisation n'est pas la tâche du bibliothécaire, mais bien de l'éducateur disposant de toutes les ressources qu'un système d'enseignement non basé sur la compétitivité lui donnerait.

Le bibliothécaire a pour objectif de développer des habitudes de lecture en mettant à la disposition du public un contenu universel, non censuré, accessible (d'où l'importance, entre autres, de l'outil technologique). Il peut agir en conjonction avec l'éducateur, mais pas comme son substitut.

Il y a plusieurs niveaux de lecture et de lecteurs. La première étape est la reconnaissance des mots, puis la seconde est la compréhension des mots. La troisième est la relation entre les phrases et les idées que le lecteur établit. Donc, la lecture est aussi un processus mental conditionné par l'environnement, c'est une forme de prise de contact avec le monde. Le CD-ROM apprend une forme de lecture, le Net également, le jeu virtuel aussi, et toutes sont différentes de celle du livre. La lecture adulte vient avec la conscience de l'adulte, c'est-à-dire avec la conscience critique. Nous bouclons alors la boucle : pas de lecture sans réforme d'ensemble de l'institution scolaire et des formes d'accès à la connaissance. C'est à ces dernières que doit s'attaquer le bibliothécaire, et non pas à la tâche de l'alphabétisation fonctionnelle. Cette dernière est une affaire d'apprentissage et d'éducation qui a la bibliothèque pour lieu capital, bien sûr, mais qui appartient d'abord à l'éducateur.

Dernière chose, et non la moindre : il existe un discours sur l'alphabétisation qui relaie celui sur la Technologie. Quand on refuse de voir les problèmes, on clame, comme George W. Bush, « Reading is the New Civil Right ». Ce slogan s'adressait à l'audience noire américaine, et fut abandonné en automne 1999 en faveur d'un « Hate Crimes Bill » plus à la mode, lui aussi abandonné en cours de campagne électorale. À noter que Bush avait appelé les Grecs « Graecians », sans doute inspiré par une célèbre formule…

Ce n'est certes pas en voulant rafraîchir un terme que l'on va parvenir à le redéfinir clairement. Au contraire, il faudrait le creuser, aller à ses racines. Le terme de bibliothèque vient de « biblios », qui veut dire livre en tant que répertoire de connaissances, de lieu d'idées, et de « thèquè », armoire, salle, réceptacle, qui réfère à la conservation, à la mémoire, au soin qui entoure la connaissance, au service, à la dimension humaine et collective. La précision et la rigueur de la définition nous donnent la substance.

Sur ce plan des définitions, on serait surpris de la provenance des termes actuels, qu'on pense créés par l'air du temps ou par la technologie. Qu'on pense à « informatique », qui nous vient de l'ex-URSS, « science de l'information » des scientifiques informaticiens américains des années 60. Alvin Schrader suggérait, entre autres appellations, « informatologue » ou « documentologue », ou encore « informatiste » comme au Maroc, lequel semble d'ailleurs revenir en surface en France. Demandons-nous pourquoi ces termes, plutôt que les nôtres, nous semblent un peu ridicules…

Bref, qu'est-ce peut bien vouloir dire une appellation « meaningful for our era » ? Celle d'un professionnel de l'information en réseau ou celle d'un professionnel du système d'information (ce qui sont quand même deux choses différentes) ? Ce dernier type de professionnel ne se retrouve-t-il pas partout ? C'est l'analyste financier, c'est un agent de voyage, c'est un grossiste, un courtier en valeurs (on parlait d' « information broker » dans les années 80, avant de parler de travailleur autonome). Dans un système qui vise essentiellement à éliminer l'intermédiaire (vendeur, épicier, transporteur, banquier, enseignant, éditeur, détaillant), dans une économie qui se veut de service, que vient y faire le bibliothécaire avec ses prétentions d'intermédiaire nécessaire ?

Au fond, on peut dire que si le spécialiste de l'information est celui de la rationalisation de l'information, le bibliothécaire est le véritable intermédiaire de la connaissance, puisqu'il connaît sa spécificité, ses valeurs et donc sa place indispensable dans la société civile. Le bibliothécaire est là pour rappeler qu'il est vain de sortir des frictions de l'espace social pour s'enfermer dans des sphères privées de la connaissance. Alors que la culture est l'ouverture sur le public et sur le monde, la logique du privé et du virtuel vise à abolir cette notion trop « encombrante » de la culture, pas assez profitable.

On pourrait donc lier la mission culturelle du bibliothécaire à l'expression de la démocratie. Cette mission est tout à l'opposé de la « bibliothèque World Wide Web ». Le Web, c'est d'abord une solution technique à un problème global de production et de circulation de l'information et des connaissances, et en ce sens, il n'apporte pas de réponse. Il est un facilitateur, un accélérateur. Il s'inscrit dans la définition de l'information-commodité, qui est une des nombreuses facettes de la connaissance, et dont on commence à en payer le prix réel.

Il est certain que la dimension de l'accès est aujourd'hui fondamentale, mais rester rivé à cette seule mesure de l'information et de son utilisation a en quelque sorte conduit à penser l'universalité de la bibliothèque comme étant nécessaire en soi, alors que ce qui est nécessaire, c'est l'organisation de l'accès. Propager le message que la bibliothèque doit devenir universelle et numérique, que c'est là son destin, constitue sans aucun doute une erreur de réflexion théorique, et aussi une orientation claire vers une conception plus managériale de la bibliothèque, vers un centre de services commerciaux ou mercantiles.

Le récent débat sur la pertinence de l'appellation « bibliothécaire » à la Corporation des bibliothécaires professionnels du Québec a démontré, pour sa part, que la crise d'identité de professionnels peut tenir à bien peu de choses : l'usage des technologies ou non, l'usage du terme « information » ou non. C'est comme demander à un notaire s'il préfère troquer son nom pour celui de médiateur familial, parce qu'il se spécialise dans cette activité. Les deux termes peuvent bien figurer ensemble sur une plaque ou une carte d'affaires, le second étant entendu comme spécialité du premier et non comme un de ses nombreux équivalents.

Doit-on penser comme Calvin Mooers, un des pères de la science de l'information malgré lui, et qui avait inventé la notion d' « information retrieval » dans les années 50 ? Mooers a inventé le Zatocoding, première forme mécanique de système de recherche documentaire. Il écrivait en 1963 : « Information Science is more an expression of hope or a slogan to rally around than it is the name of a profession » (« The Educational Challenge of Information Science », in Automated and Scientific Communication, 26th Annual Meeting of the American Documentation Institute, p. 127).

Slogan ou réalité définissable que cette appellation donc ? Les choses ont-elles tellement changé depuis l'époque de Mooers que l'on doive mettre sur le compte de la technologie primitive cette échappée ? Cet aveu ?

(Vu sur La Toile du Québec, cette bibliothèque, selon son fondateur Yves Williams, à la rubrique Travailleurs autonomes en gestion de l'information, les offres suivantes : Unité mobile qui va sur place pour déchiqueter vos documents confidentiels ; Analyse fonctionnelle, développement et programmation de processus d'affaires en vue de l'informatisation).

Pierre Blouin

A Political Economy of Librarianship ?

William F. Birdsall

Librarians are striving to insure that libraries are part of emerging national and global information infrastructures. The creation of these infrastructures is typically presented as being the result of developments in information technology, in particular, the convergence of computing and telecommunications. Such a view encourages librarians to be lulled into thinking the challenge facing them is solely technical. This is not the case. The potential transformation of libraries due to developments in information technology cannot be divorced from political and economic forces driving technological change. Consequently, this paper argues that there is a need for a political economy of librarianship.

1.

The phrase “political economy” conjures up for many images of quaint looking eighteenth and nineteenth century economists. And rightly so. All the great eighteenth and nineteenth century founders of modern economics—Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx—were political economists because they recognized the intimate connection between economics and politics, between economy and state. The focus of the classical economics of the eighteenth century was on the nature and generation of the wealth of nations, as exemplified by its most famous exponent, Adam Smith. As the economic historian Robert Heilbroner observes, “the attribute of early capitalism most attractive to [Adam] Smith was political, not economic.” (Heilbroner 1996, 56) Early political economists were attempting to explain not only the new phenomenon of the capital market but also its relationship to the state and the welfare of its citizens.

There have been various schools of political economy including the classical or liberal, the Marxist and, more recently, the institutional. (Babe 1995, 72-75) In the latter case political economists are attempting to move away from the ideological connotations surrounding the liberal and Marxist traditions. Instead, they focus more on the concrete world of politicians and political processes, policy players, and how they relate to economic forces. Whatever the focus or method, “…the immediate central political issue in capitalism, the issue that takes on an often obsessive prominence in every capitalist nation … is the relationship between business and government, or from a somewhat more distant perspective, between the economy and the state.” (Heibroner 1992, 50)

Early political economy was the foundation of the modern social sciences; indeed, by the twentieth century economics and political science became professional disciplines that staked out separate spheres of social life for investigation. However, more recently there is the recognition that the separation of economics and politics as distinct disciplines is an artificial one. As Todd Buchholz, student of economic theory and former member of the White House Economic Policy Council, observes: “The strongest link between economics and the real world has always been politics.” (Buchholz 1989, 2) Political economy is a thriving field of scholarly pursuit as perusal of the titles on the in-print lists of respectable university presses attest. Indeed, regarding the name “political economy,” the Oxford Dictionary of Economics asserts: “It can be argued that it [political economy] is actually a better name for the subject [economics], as it draws attention to the political motivation of economic policies: policy makers and lobbyists are often more concerned with the income distribution than with the efficiency effects of policies.” (Black 1997, 357)

How does a political economist differ from the more widely recognized commonplace economist? University of Ottawa professor in communications studies Robert Babe asserts that political economists “place the question of power front and center.” (1995, 63) They recognize that the economic system does not derive from some divine or natural law but is a human creation that cannot be divorced from considerations of power relations in society. Indeed, according to Babe, political economy “…seeks to reintegrate, for purposes of comprehension and analysis, the polity and economy.” Thus, political economists “…address the impact of laws, regulation, political influence, and governmental processes on economic activity, and conversely the manner and degree whereby economic activity and financial matters impinge upon legislation and legislative processes.” Political economy is, then, “…the study of the economy as a system of power.” (1995, 71) Business leaders and policy pundits advocate the differentiation of the economy and the state, but political economy reveals that economics and politics are entwined by power relationships. As the earlier quote from Oxford Dictionary of Economics noted, the primary concern of policy makers and those who attempt to influence them is most often their own interests, not the public good, a particularly noteworthy point when we look shortly at the current political realm of the library.

No profession concerned with the administration of a public institution, such as the library, can ignore the need to pursue serious research into the politico-economic sphere of public policy. Understanding the enduring link between economics and politics is crucial to understanding the current political realm of librarianship. Achieving this understanding is the reason for the need to develop a political economy of librarianship. Currently, the primary attention librarians give to politics and economics is political advocacy for the purpose of generating enhanced funding of libraries. Such advocacy is admittedly very important and librarians have become increasingly sophisticated at doing it. However, I assert that librarians need to devote more effort researching the political and economic dynamics that define the past and current environment of libraries. Libraries are the creation and instrument of public policy derived from political processes. Understanding these processes includes appreciating the connection between the polity and the economy. This connection between the polity and economy defines the political realm of the library and the basis for this paper's claim that there is a need to develop a political economy of librarianship.

2.

Is it especially important at this time that librarians concern themselves with the power relationships embodied in the economy and polity because so much government information public policy is currently under the spell of an ideology of information technology. (Birdsall 1996) This is an ideology that promotes economic ends by diminishing the political will and power of the general citizen. It promotes consumer sovereignty over citizen sovereignty. Accordingly, it denigrates the value of public institutions such as the library and advocates the moving of the services they provide out of the category of public goods and into that of commodities to be traded in the marketplace.

The ideology of information technology consists of the following chain of premises:

Information technology is the sole cause of the inevitable economic, social, and cultural change from an industrial society to an information society,
In the knowledge-based economy only the marketplace should determine how information, its primary raw material, is generated, priced, and distributed.
The market is at its most efficient when government does not intervene, especially in the global economy.

Government's primary role is to promote a competitive market through deregulation, privatization and the development of ecommerce.

The knowledge-based economy requires a new kind of worker, a knowledge worker who is prepared to go anywhere in the world to sell her or his skills.
The knowledge worker is expected to have no loyalties to the local community and its public institutions.
The knowledge- based economy also requires a new kind of citizen, the citizen as consumer. The primary responsibility of a good citizen is to be a good consumer at the information highway mall.

The ideology of information technology promotes a fatalism that encourages political passivity by claiming that our fates are determined by inevitable technological change, the “natural” laws of the free market, and the uncontrollable gale forces of global creative destruction.

Heilbroner observes that “…ideologies are systems of thought and belief by which dominant classes explain to themselves [his emphasis] how their social system operates and what principles it exemplifies.” (1985, 107) The ideology of information technology is consistently expounded in the business media and by industry funded think tanks, government departments, politicians, popular futurists, and corporate leaders. Business and political elites constantly promulgate this ideology to justify and explain to themselves—and to convince others—that this is the way the world is, the way it has to be. It is, in short, a rhetorical device used for persuasive, ideological reasons. As Simon Fraser University Professor of Communications, William Leiss, points out, this persuasive intent leads to a self-fulfilling circularity. If we can be persuaded that the information society, for example, is inevitable and alter our behaviour and policy accordingly, we will find the “inevitability” of the initial prediction achieved. He describes this process as follows:

Analysis develops a conceptual model, namely, the concept of the “information society” whose objective is to influence
Policy initiatives that will create favorable conditions for shaping a
Social Response that over time results in changed social behavior and new
Behavior Patterns that resemble those originally predicted as desirable in the
Analysis itself, thus confirming the model's predictions about what was “inevitable.” (Liess 1989, 284)

Ideology, in time, reality becomes

3.

This is the political realm that threatens the library. Libraries are marginalized as institutions serving the public. Instead, the ideology postulates that the private sector can most efficiently meet consumer needs by delivering information directly to consumers through an electronic market on the privately constructed and operated information highway. Industry Canada is given the mandate by government to promote the private sector construction of the information highway while it focuses on a “Connecting Canadians” access policy aimed at delivering Canadians to the Internet mall. As for information generated by the government itself, adherents of the ideology believe it should be sold directly to the consumer rather than distributed free through the library. The commodification of information should be facilitated by government copyright policies that favor creators over users and privacy legislation aimed at promoting e-commerce rather than wider social needs. Furthermore, the distribution of information in the market should be promoted by privatizing and deregulating public services, such as libraries, broadcasting, and telecommunications that were formerly required to meet universal access public policy requirements.

Government's reliance on the private sector to build the information highway has had a direct and logical consequence for the funding of public institutions. The building of the infrastructure and the development of services do require a massive infusion of capital. Hence, the almost obsessive attention given in the popular media about the mergers and acquisitions of information technology companies, the issuing of IPOs, the rise and fall of the Nasdaq Stock Market, the emergence of ecommerce, and the phenomenon of the over-night creation of twenty-something millionaires. Of more direct consequence to libraries is the logical result that corporations in the information and telecommunications sector, eager to absorb all available capital, strive to diminish funds flowing to government by urging that debt reduction be given the highest government priority, that telecommunications firms and their employees be given tax breaks, and that public funding give highest priority to technical and scientific training.

4.

Scholars in other disciplines outside of librarianship have challenged the validity of the premises of the ideology of information technology. Of particular relevance to librarianship is the rich body of Canadian research in the political economy of communications. Inspired by the work of Dallas Smythe, if not actually trained by him at the University of Regina and Simon Fraser University, a distinguished line of scholars in Canada have pursued a political economy research agenda in communication studies. (Mosco 1996, 82-97) Among their works librarians should consult Vincent Mosco's The Pay-per Society (1989) and The Political Economy of Communication (1996). There is Robert E. Babe's Telecommunications in Canada (1990) and Communication and the Transformation of Economics (1995). Dwayne Winseck's Reconvergence: A Political Economy of Telecommunications in Canada (1998) extends the work of these earlier studies.

Activists in librarianship, working through such bodies as the Canadian Library Association Committee on Information Policy, have also challenged the premises of the ideology of information technology. (Campbell 1998) Nonetheless, practicing librarians, struggling to formulate effective political strategies to insure citizens' access to knowledge through libraries lack a body of research that could provide them with a conceptual framework within which to develop effective advocacy strategies. There has been little sustained critical inquiry within librarianship of the premises upon which much government economic policy is founded. What would be the characteristics of a political economy of librarianship?

5.

In his The Political Economy of Communication (1996) Vincent Mosco discusses four characteristics of political economy that provide a framework for how a political economy of librarianship could be formulated. (Mosco, 27-38) For Mosco, the first characteristic of political economy is a focus on social change and historical transformation. Librarians are not, of course, unaware that these are times of social change. However, they avoid critical analysis of this change: rather, they have uncritically adopted the popular simplification of a shift to an information society. The study of library history has become an arcane specialization within librarianship. Its place within the curriculum of schools of library and information studies has been greatly diminished with the result that new practitioners have little understanding of the political and economic environment confronting libraries. (This lack is perhaps being offset to some extent by the greater attention some schools are now giving to information public policy.)

Following on the focus on social change, political economy as a discipline is concerned with the social totality. While it is primarily concerned with the economic and political aspects of life, it encompasses the full range of social and cultural life. Again, librarians have increasingly narrowed their perspective, concentrating on how librarians as “information managers” can contribute to the electronic transmission of information to the customer rather than on the role of librarianship in promoting access to knowledge in all its forms in the educational, cultural, social, political, and economic life of the citizen.

A third characteristic of political economy is its grounding in moral philosophy, that is, a concern for social values and practices. Librarianship, with its commitment to universal access to knowledge is certainly not devoid of moral values. Librarians have tended to want to project librarianship as an objective profession transcending any particular political or moral imperatives. Their ideal is to retreat to a value free information science. Such a stance is untenable at a time when the existence of libraries is threatened by a pervasive ideology that maintains that the generation, distribution and provision of access to knowledge should be provided through an economic market sustained on an information highway build and controlled by the private sector.

The fourth characteristic of political economy identified by Mosco is praxis, the real world of human activity. Political economy strives to relate theory and practice and in that respect it is closely related to such disciplines as communication, policy and cultural studies. The focus on praxis leads to the question: who will create a political economy of librarianship? There has always been a gap between the practitioner in the field and the academic in the professional school. Developing a political economy of librarianship can provide a common ground bringing practitioner and researcher together. Communication scholar Herbert Schiller's delineation of the characteristics of a political economy of culture identifies lines of inquiry that can be jointly pursued by the practitioner and academic in librarianship: “It requires, among other qualities, the scrutiny of decision-making processes, the identification of the participants as far as it is possible to do so, the weighting of their relative influences, and the factoring of fiscal, administrative, and technical acts of commission and omission.” (Schiller, 83) Following along Schiller's suggestive points, a political economy of librarianship could examine, for example, the validity of the premises of the ideology of information technology, how they have become incorporated into public policy, and whose ends are being met.

6.

Telecommunications public policy issues are increasingly among those issues daily confronting librarians. All the issues that have been central concerns of modern librarianship are challenged by those advancing the development of a global, information technology based economy. Concepts about which there was once general agreement, such as intellectual property rights, intellectual freedom, and universal access are open to debate and redefinition in the world of the Internet. (Adams and Birdsall 1999) The relevance of public institutions such as the library is challenged by those advocating the allocation of services in accordance with demand generated by those who can pay. The confluence of research and practice in a political economy of librarianship can strengthen the library profession for the critical advocacy and political role it must play in creating a new telecommunications environment that insures citizen access to knowledge.

This paper argues that a political economy of librarianship is required, especially at this time when a pervasive ideology of information technology seeks to replace the role of libraries with market mechanism in the provisions of information and knowledge. Furthermore, it is my position that practitioners in the field should combine their front line experience with theoretical perspective of academics to formulate jointly a political economy of librarianship. Finally, I encourage librarians to draw on the political economy tradition of the cognate discipline of communications studies, which can provide conceptual frameworks and specific lines of inquiry.

References

Adams, Karen, and William F. Birdsall. 1998. Editors. Understanding telecommunications and public policy. Ottawa: Canadian Library Association.

Babe, Robert E. 1995. Communication and the transformation of economics. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.

Babe, Robert E. 1990. Telecommunications in Canada: technology, industry, and government. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Birdsall, William F. 1996. The Internet and the ideology of information technology. The Internet: transforming our society now, INET 96. Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Internet Society, 25-28 June, 1996, Montreal. http://www.crim.ca/inet96/papers/e3/e3_2.htm.

Black, John. 1997. Oxford dictionary of economics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Buchholz, Todd G. 1989. New ideas from dead economists. New York: Plume.

Campbell, Brian. 1998. The politics of universal service. In Karen Adams and William F. Birdsall. Understanding telecommunications and public policy. Ottawa: Canadian Library Association. 51-70.

Heilbroner, Robert. 1985. The nature and logic of capitalism. New York: Norton.

Heilbroner, Robert. 1992. Twentieth-first century capitalism. Concord, ON.: House of Anansi Press.

Leiss, William. 1989. The myth of the information society. In Ian Angus and Sut Jhally. Editors. Cultural politics in contemporary America. New York: Routledge. 282-298.

Mosco, Vincent. 1989. The pay-per society: computers and communication in the information age. Toronto: Garamond Press.

Mosco, Vincent. 1996. The political economy of communication. London: Sage.

Schiller, Herbert I. 1984. Information and the crisis economy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing.

Winseck, Dwayne. 1998. Reconvergence: a political economy of telecommunications in Canada. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press.

William F. Birdsall is Executive Director of Novanet, a consortium of Nova Scotia academic libraries. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and should not be attributed to his employer.

MegaMetaphorics: Re-Reading Globalization, Sustainability, and Virtualization as Rhetorics of World Politics

Timothy W. Luke

Department of Political Science
Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University
Blacksburg, VA
twluke@vt.edu

Presented at the Symposium on
Politics and Metaphors, International
Society for Political Psychology, July 18-19, 1999

O. An Overview

What are "world politics?" For some, this question is easy: it is anything political about, from or on the current world system of states, economies, and nations. For others, this question is much more difficult: it is the politics of world-definition, world-construction, world-action. And, for still others, the question necessarily mixes a measure from each of the previous groups. This paper takes the third way, casting the politics of world-definition as part and parcel of the nitty-gritty political dynamics of our world.1 Still, all of this questioning does not occur in a vacuum. To answer, one must track the questioners out into many networks, and see how their answers, once set into various rhetorics of world politics, are being used to shape political institutions and movements around the world.

This paper compares and contrasts three active rhetorical formations now believed in the U.S. to be circulating around the world -- globalization in economic discourses, sustainability for ecological debates, and virtualization in studies of informational society -– to examine provisionally how these terms are being used, and perhaps abused, in such webs of questions and answers to imagine national community, economic prosperity, and cultural identity.2 The metaphorics behind megasystemic changes cannot be escaped. As a result, they might be essential terms for explaining many of the world's contemporary political threats, economic crises, and cultural splits. The focus in this preliminary discussion will fall on the U.S. where the growing use, and abuse, of these terms in both mass media and social science during the 1990s provide many instructive examples of how megametaphorics shape political discourse. Ultimately, the purpose behind this re-reading of megametaphorical constructs is to understand how world politics are imagined as well as to see more fully who is believed to be leading whom, and why, into an operational space where the politics of the world are tied to such rhetorical constructs.

I. Metaphors and Politics

Metaphors draw likenesses between objects, ideas or events. From the Greek metapherein, the metaphorical "comes from beyond" and "over," meta, and "makes comparisons" or "brings analogies," pherein. Metaphors serve as metaphrases for thought, translating the nonidentical into the undifferent through artful allusions. Such allusions should not be dismissed too quickly, because altered wordings easily can, in turn, alter our worlds. Consequently, metaphors should be watched. Their "as ifs" and "not unlikes" can prove to be critical moments of mental metamorphosis, which transform human action and cognition simply by suggesting what seems dissimilar might be alike, causing those who once acted differently and reasoned oppositely to come together. Megametaphors are great, extended, mighty or powerful metaphorics that operate as ready-made, easy-to-use, knock-off modes of reasoning. Great extended forms of mighty alikeness or great difference are the narrative nuclei that sustain politics, enabling those who would rule to define friend and foe, same and other, here and there in the ontologues of their statecraft.

For those who share Lyotard's incredulity in metanarrative at this moment in world history, megametaphorics seem to serve as satisfying or suggestive navigational bearings with their own polysemic qualities.3 Not quite paralogies, and plainly not confirmed truths, megametaphors, like globalization, sustainability, and virtualization, slip into politics, as basic foreground or deep background, for many accounts of the world's collective action. For those who are less anxious about modernity at its present posting, the lexical powers of megametaphors are even more useful for creating a common language out of uncommon experiences and extraordinary changes. Such great alikenesses allow many apparently inchoate events and dissimilar tendencies to be lumped with each other in suggestive fables of meaningful transformation. These myths, in turn, are circulated so widely, rapidly, and deeply that they soon become such a commonplace, through such repetitive rehearsals, that they place everyone in the same conceptual and practical commons.

Megametaphors crystallize seemingly disconnected and unrelated phenomena into single expressions, turning a booming-and-buzzing confusion into somewhat coherent events. Megametaphorics articulate a language of images to account for events, and these accounts, once set forth as iconic expressions, also stand for individual and collective experiences. In megametaphors, one finds the cultus, or the impulse to find meaning, in culture, and the acculturalizing mechanisms for propagating such meaningful impulses of interpretation. Beyond the physics of worldwide markets, environmental rationality or digital technics, these megametaphors simultaneously project and capture a new metaphysics of meaning to suggest why so many inchoate events "are like" globalization, sustainability or virtualization. As Burke claims, metaphors should not be easily dismissed. They are not far removed from the rigor of scientific reasoning; indeed, "whole works of scientific research, even entire schools, are hardly more than the patient repetition, in all of is ramifications, of a fertile metaphor."4

By exploring how some megametaphors circulate today, this analysis investigates the manner in which discursive terms can produce codirection, coevaluation, and cooperation in political activity out of the extended reach of powerful allusions. Everything is always discursively mediated, but discursive mediations are not everything.5 Therefore, one must examine how discourse produces disciplinary outcomes and why people and things keep to the mediated interactions shaped by such discourses. Megametaphors provide one explanation for these developments.

Megametaphors are ontopolitical scripts meant to anchor conventional assumptions about who are political agents, where are they based, what is political, and how they behave where they are as political actors.6 They are continuously rejiggering notions of what is nature, what is society, what is politics, and what is valuable. Their matrices of likeness and difference, however, are often, as Walker observes, highly overdetermined.7 And, this overdetermination provides much of the source code for their cultural impact. Globalization is difficult to conceptualize except as the loss of sovereignty, sustainability is hard to grasp without seeing that it combines what has already been obtained by the industrial (and is being attained by the industrializing) into something which is to be sustained, and virtualization is tough to imagine without suppressing materiality. These events seem to be happening, and megametaphors suggests what they are "like" and "unlike." As maps of the world made out of words, metametaphors suffuse new actions as world map readings. Thus, the world is remade, in part, out of words as the territory of the world begins to match the practicable coordinates captured by words.8

II. The Doxic Effects of Metaphor

Those who resolutely cling to a naïve instrumental understanding of language in which words always have definite meanings, clear uses, and neutral loadings will be disappointed with this paper. Such approaches to language are often unsophisticated, presumptuous, and confused. Instead, this investigation follows Bourdieu, who suggests that "when dealing with the social world, the ordinary use of ordinary language makes metaphysicians of us."9 Megametaphorics are about using words in quite sophisticated, artful, and unconfused performances whose power and knowledge effects can be profound and pervasive precisely because of their metaphysical scope. Language is action, and the word-making moves of megametaphorics quite often have world-making outcomes. The metaphysics of meaning in megametaphors here are quite powerful and political.

In this respect, Bourdieu also is correct: "The social world is the locus of struggles over words which owe their seriousness -- and sometimes their violence -- to the fact that words to a great extent make things, and that changing words, and, more generally, representations (for example, pictorial representation, like Manet), is already a way of changing things. Politics is, essentially, a matter of words."10 This observation is true inasmuch as individuals and groups tussle, over words, with language, and in deeds, for greater symbolic power. And the megametaphoric act of naming things, and thereby bringing them into being out of nothingness, is, as Bourdieu argues, "the most typical demonstration"11 of such power-in-action.

Megametaphors capture, in a sense, many versal possibilities as they get caught up in the politics of actualizing their more complete universalization. All who seek greater globalization, sustainability or virtualization can articulate polysemic performative discourses with such terms, which illustrate what it is "like" to be global, attain sustainable development, and become virtual. At the same time, experts will opine about these phenomena and lay persons will believe their opinions, confirming the new doxa of these discourses.12 Those discussions, however, essentially start to extrude elements of globalization, sustainability, and virtualization out of the debates exploring what these phenomena could be. By presuming to suggest what such changes should be, their exponents cause parallel events and processes to come into effect, which test what they should and should not be. The hesitant and multiversal qualities of such transformations, at the same time, become much more definitive and universal, because megametaphors anchor the mythic invention of their referents. Globalization could be many different things, as could sustainability or virtuality, but they all require very specific forms of completion, definition, and execution because of how they are imagined by the doxosophers who discover, define, and then deploy them in social life. Such doxosophical agents are ambiguous forces. To some, they may seem to be popular organic intellectuals; but, in the main, they live and work in the far more inorganic domains of business, industry, and the professions.13 Hence, it is more plausible to see them as "inorganic intellectuals."

Such inorganic intellectuals also appear to be the creators, and the creations, of fully mediatized and highly educated publics who accept, as Bourdieu claims, "the vague debates of a political philosophy without technical content, a social science reduced to journalistic commentary for election nights, and uncritical glossing of unscientific opinion polls."14 Because they openly trade in and out of the ordinary opinions that are dearly embraced by some simply because they have already been accepted by many, these figures become popular doxosophers. Their doxosophies very frequently derive from ideas and ethics that are extruded from megametaphorics. Not surprisingly, such inorganic intellectuals, as Bourdieu asserts, are "`technicians of opinion who think themselves wise'" and they always, "pose the problems of politics in the very same terms in which they are posed by businessmen, politicians, and political journalists (in other words the very people who can afford to commission surveys...)."15 As lovers of opinion, they continue to propound new doxa from their doxic researches and analyses.

If organic intellectuals are those whose conceptual innovations and moral commitments are developed in association with progressive social movements coming from the lower reaches of society, then one must see most exponents of megametaphorical discourse as cadres of inorganic intellectuals working in alliance with fixed interests at the upper reaches of the economy. While Marx reminds us that the ruling ideas of every epoch are those of the owning class, such ideas rarely can be propounded artfully by those individuals.16 More articulate voices, however, can always be found, and their powers of persuasion quickly mix and match the themes and tones needed for megametaphoric discourse.

Megametaphors are decisively important here, because they contribute to a habitus shared by major corporate, governmental, and professional authorities. Allusions to alikeness and definitions of difference in megametaphorical constructs can be expressed through actions when agents share a habitus. As Bourdieu maintains, "the habitus fulfills a function which another philosophy consigns to a transcendental conscience: it is a socialized body, a structured body, a body which has incorporated the immanent structures of a world or of a particular sector of that world--a field--and which structures the perception of that world as well as action in that world."17 The ideas of necessity, desirability, and universality implied by megametaphors like globalization, sustainability, and virtualization are imparted to institutions and other ideas through habitus as it "retranslates the intrinsic and relational characteristics of a position" in the world with its many styles of living into "a unitary set of choices of persons, goods, practices."18 Once the doxic effects of megametaphors like globalizing, sustainability, and virtualizing, begin to shape the fields of action and decision, they get integrated into the shared habitus. There, inside of such doxological systems of classification, division, and valorization, megametaphors help make "distinctions between what is good and what is bad, between what is right and what is wrong, between what is distinguished and what is vulgar," as the constructs of the world carried by words push and pull everyone toward world constructions that match the wording megametaphorical discourses.19

As these megametaphorics become constructed discursively by contemporary technoscience and civic discourse, the art of government continues to find "the principles of its rationality" tied to "the specific reality of the state," where the rhetorical programs of globalization, sustainability, and virtualization are shaped to serve the systemic requirements of politics.20 Government always comes into its own when it has the welfare of populations, the improvement of their condition, the increase of their wealth, security, longevity, health, etc. as its object. And, megametaphors can give rational firms and governments all of the planet's life to reformat as "endangered populations," needing various corporate commodities and state ministrations to transform their lives into objects of managerial control as part and part of "a range of absolute new tactics and techniques."21 Coping with globality, sustainability, and virtuality simply crystallize the latest consolidation of instrumental rationality's "three movements: government, population, political economy, which constitute...a solid series, one which even today has assuredly not been dissolved"22 in the buzz of megametaphorics.

Finding the world's communities and individuals focused on their protection in terms of "safety" or "security" turns into a key theme of many political operations, economic interventions, and ideological campaigns to raise public standards of collective morality, personal responsibility, and collective vigor. The world politics being defined in these megametaphorics, therefore, operate as "a whole series of different tactics that combined in varying proportions the objective of disciplining the body and that of regulating populations."23 The creation, circulation, and consolidation of megametaphors all contribute to the construction of self-evidence for the terms and conditions that these megametaphorics conjure up from discourse. Megametaphors bolster the symbolic order of society to the extent that they are, first, systematic and coherent as discursive frameworks, and, second, consistent and agreeable with objective conditions in the institutional structures of society. In these dispositions, megametaphorics can, in turn, ensure popular belief broadly in the established order as well as coordinate effectively the actions and thoughts of the ruling/owning/controlling elites by finding the right relations of "24

Megametaphorical interconnections become even more intriguing in the aftermath of the Cold War. Having won the long twilight struggle against communist totalitarianism, the United States is governed by leaders who see "Earth in the balance," arguing that global ecologies and economies now incarnate what is best and worst in the human spirit. On the one hand, economists, industrialists, and political leaders increasingly represent the strategic terrain of the post-1991 world system in languages in which all nations compete ruthlessly to control the future development of the world economy by developing new technologies, dominating more markets, and exploiting every national economic asset. On the other hand, the phenomenon of "failed states," ranging from basket cases like Rwanda, Somalia or Angola to crippled entities like Ukraine, Afghanistan or Kazakhstan, often is attributed to the severe environmental frictions associated with rapid economic growth.25 Consequently, a genuine world politics, whose key issues range from global stability to sustainable development to virtual community, are getting greater consideration in the name of creating jobs, maintaining growth, or advancing technological development in the politics of the post-Cold War era.

Through the alikenesses of megametaphorics, a new order of things emerges out of some odd linkages between globalization screeds, sustainability theories, and virtualization writings as they interoperate in the normalizing discussions of firms, states, and the media. This normalization project is a vast undertaking, and not all of its implications have revealed themselves at this juncture. In following sections of this study, a handful of elective affinities are explored to observe how these megametaphors have started circulating after the Cold War in the networks of public discourses, foreign policy, and neo-liberal capitalism.

III. "Globalization"

Globalization megametaphorics allude to a whole new world. Reich speaks plainly about "the emerging global economy," because it is like the loss of borders, the end of boundaries, and the disappearance of state sovereignties, "as almost every factor of production -– money, technology, factories, and equipment -– moves effortlessly across borders," so completely and so rapidly that "the very idea of an American economy is becoming meaningless, as are the notions of an American corporation, American capital, American products, American technology.26

In the concentration of commercialized values and economic practices within world-wide exchange, globality begins to equal a "world-city, the city to end all cities," and "in these basically eccentric or, if you like, omnipolitan conditions, the various social and cultural realities that still constitute a nation's wealth will soon give way to a sort of 'political' stereo-reality in which the interaction of exchanges will no longer look any different from the--automatic--interconnection of financial markets today."27 In keeping with Fredric Jameson's explorations of postmodernity, globalization "is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good."28 Economy and society, culture and politics, science and technology all acquire the qualities of a second or even third nature with their own time within/over/beyond the now lost verities of first nature's time and space now long buried, or at least suppressed, by multiple modernizing projects.

The megametaphorics of globalization, whether they are spun by statesmen or journalists, emphasize the unlikeness of the present (1989 and after) to the recent past (prior to 1989). Reich's vision of "nationality" versus "transnationality" or Friedman's old "Cold War system" versus the emergent "globalization system" are meant to construct a world of difference and alikeness betwixt and between various qualities to the contemporary moment in history.29 For Friedman, globalization is a trope tying together neo-liberal capitalist rationalization, informational technics, mass consumption culture, and integrated world markets. Its megametaphorics are considerably different than those of the Cold War, as this doxological summation from Friedman suggests:

If the defining perspective of the Cold War world was "division," the defining perspective of globalization is "integration." The symbol of the Cold War system was a wall, which divided everyone. The symbol of the globalization system is a World Wide Web, which unites everyone. The defining document of the Cold War system was "The Treaty." The defining document of the globalization system is "The Deal"....While the defining measurement of the Cold War was weight--particularly the throw weight of missiles--the defining document of the globalization system is speed--speed of commerce, travel, communication, and innovation. Globalization is about Moore's law, which states that the computing power of silicon chips will double every eighteen to twenty-four months. In the Cold War, the most frequently asked question was: "How big is your missile?" In globalization, the most frequently asked question is: "How fast is your modem?"....If the defining anxiety of the Cold War was fear of annihilation from an enemy you knew all too well in a world struggle that was fixed and stable, the defining anxiety in globalization is fear of rapid change from an enemy you can't see, touch, or feel--a sense that your job, community or workplace can be changed at any moment by anonymous economic and technological forces that are anything but stable.30

This extended explication of alikenesses and differences in globalization remediates the world's meaning in the measures of increasing speed, instability, and collaboration all tied to remaking the world into 1s and 0s. Of course, these forces are all at work beneath, beyond, and behind the chatter of discourse, but their doxic effects redound in the discursive figures of globalization, sustainability, and virtualization.
Time and value in globalization are much more than merely getting in motion, as Friedman submits, they are "on speed." Whether one labels it "McWorld," "time-space compression," or "fast capitalism,"31 the current situation, as Virilio suggests, is increasingly one of "chrono-politics" in which the sense of temporal chronologies, spatial geographies, and moral axiologies shared by many human beings is reshaped by speed. While Virilio's overall project is not without faults, his sense of the power of speed is quite useful. In globalization, speed rules over many more aspects of everyday life as it experiences "the dromocratic revolution."32 These effects are global in their scope and impact, even though their disparate influences in any single locality are not yet entirely understood.

Consequently, globalization articulates a megametaphorical domain with its own cultural kinematics for time and value, in which conventional understandings of alikeness are being reshaped by technological, social, and economic motions in themselves. "Since movement creates the event," as Virilio argues, "the real is kinedramatic."33 A world that moves faster, then, begins to circulate and valorize discourses of speed. A critical appreciation of such kinedramatics suggests that global events often flow on a global scale but at a local level. Perhaps these "kineformations," which are serving as an unstable new mode of cultural organization, are more accurately, the new global/local frames of new "glocality?" The actually existing structures of the fast capitalist McWorld are held together in the compressed time-space of glocal discourses and practices. Whether it is McWorld or MacWorld, Planet Reebok or The Nature Company, Microsoft or Gateway, the cultural values and time scales of such new corporate, social and technological glocality trace the kinedramatic outlines of globalization. This is a dominant metaphorical allusion for this New World Order.34

These glocalities exist as just-in-time assemblies. Their communities, uniformities, collectivities happen in flight as unstable but cohesive serializations of subjectivity and collaborative organizations in objectification. Just-in-time unities often are occluded otherwise-in-space as purely local phenomena or essentially stable tendencies. New values, in turn, emerge just in time. Without too much irony, Shell Oil claims that getting there "at the speed of life" is what most now value, while "moving at the speed of business," according to United Parcel Service, articulates the valorizing pay-off of business itself in the many businesses of speed. As speed acquires value for its own sake, slow folks are separated from the fast class, steady savers slip behind fast money, and slow growth falls below fast pay-outs. Speed rules that fellow traveling in time will eclipse common residence in space as a key nexus of personal and social identity.

Those who collaborate in the collective construction of this actual transnationality out of capitalist kineformations, in turn, no longer necessarily hold as dear their nominal nationality within territorial space. Instead, they increasingly slip into other registers of time and space working and living as co-accelerant, com-motive, or con-chronous agents of fast capitalist firms. In moving from the spatio-temporal perspectives of territoriality to the acceleration effects of instant communication and rapid transportation, "all of Earth's inhabitants may well wind up thinking of themselves more as contemporaries than as citizens; they may in the process slip out of the contiguous space, distributed by quota, of the old Nation-State (or City-State), which harbored the demos, and into the atopic community of a "Planet-State" that unfolds as "a sort of omnipolitan periphery whose centre will be nowhere and circumference everywhere."35 The omnipolitanization of the planet is articulated in many "real time" events: the greenhouse effect, new national diasphoras, holes in the ozone layer, the global demographic explosion, twenty-four hour a day currency markets, ATT World Net, narcocapitalist agrarian economies, the environmental movement, AOL everywhere and 7x24 TV news channels.36 Time and space are tightly compressed, like the hyperreal worldwatch of CNN/CNBC/BBC World, which reposition "real time" observation/participation in collective action anywhere into consciousness everywhere in the ordinary lifeworld.

Globalization finds alikeness working in the specificities of national locality, while the locals gain from the flexibilities of transnational generality. Transnationalized kineformations generate their own intra-corporate economies of time and value, hollowing nation-states out to maintain adequate profitability at fairly low levels of capacity utilization by in/out-sourcing anything from anywhere to sell to anybody. The time horizon is the firm's daily production deadlines, and the value standards of its quarterly reports guide the enterprises' survival. Omnipolitanization around the world advances further with every downsizing, value-adding, or restructuring maneuver by transnational capitalism. Omnipolitan time and value expand, because, as Greider notes, to succeed,

firms must become globalized, not American or German or Japanese, but flexible hydras with feet planted in many different markets, making so-called world products that are adaptable across different cultures. Multinational are already from nation to nation, continent to continent, maximizing profit by continually adjusting the sources of output to capitalize on the numerous shifting variables: demand, price, currency values, politics. To function on the global plane, managers must be prepared to sacrifice parts of the enterprise, even the home base, at least temporarily, to protect themselves against the transient tides that undermine profit margins.37

Sacrificing home base, however, often means forsaking its grounded values and leaving its time zones to accelerate along the "real time" lines of capital's transnational valorizing flight. Marginal profits made in seconds, as calculated in cross-national currency matrices, now rezone time economies and value expectations. This is globalizing time: the transnational rush of financial, monetary, and capital telemetry on the bottom of 7x24 TV news channels or front and center in major market intranet monitors.38 The glocal is kinedramatic; and, from these kinedramas, speed controls events as it makes time and sets value. Globalization is like being on speed.

The stable serialization of such local kinedramatic moments shapes the contours of global kineformations, or organized social relations whose participants are unified by shared movements, matched rates of speed, or common trajectories. On one level, one sees the discursive traditions and common values of omnipolitan society becoming more kinedramatic as shared movements through televisual reality or collective interactions in telematic connectivity coalesce in common emotions, i.e., shock from images out of Bosnia, repulsion at news feed from Rwanda, fear in contemplating Chernobyl, pathos from the wreak of Exxon Valdez, loss on the passing of Mother Teresa, grief in Princess Di's car crash, agony in Kosovo's refugees teeming into Macedonia.39 On another level, however, the kinedramaturgies of global cultures also are sustainably developed by global commerce's kineformations of production, consumption, accumulation, exchange.

Reich captures the kineformative qualities of capital in contradictions between "nominal nationality" and "actual transnationality" in the corporate world. Old territorialized containments of national, high-volume enterprise with the values of top-down control and time sense centralized executive ownership are being displaced by new telemetrical webs of transnational, high-value enterprises unified by their rapid reactions to problem-solving, problem-identifying, solution-creating, solution-brokering challenges. In this mode of valorization, efficient capital becomes new type of kineformation whose variable informational and industrial geometries operate,

...in many places around the globe other than the United States. As the world shrinks through efficiencies in telecommunications and transportation, such groups in one nation are able to combine their skills with those of people located in other nations in order to provide the greatest value to customers located almost anywhere. The threads of the global web are computer, facsimile machines, satellites, high-resolution monitors, and modems--all of them linking designers, engineers, contractors, licensees, and dealers worldwide.40

Transnational kineformations completely bypass nominal nationality and territorial spatiality, centering their own kinedramatic movements of capital, labor, technology, and goods within their own "real time" interactions. In 1990, for example, "more than half of America's exports and imports, by value, were simply the transfers of such goods and services within global corporations," which suggests much of America's, and many other nation's, GNP is simply the gross corporate product of transnational flowmations operating inside their increasingly irrelevant national borders.41

Within these glocal webs of capitalist kineformations, value arises from continuously improving the rate and scope of any firm's quick, flexible, and thorough response to market forces. Using just-in-time outsourcing techniques, as Reich notes, goods and services "can be produced efficiently in many different locations, to be combined in all sorts of ways to serve customer needs in many places. Intellectual and financial capital can come from anywhere, and be added instantly."42 Producers/consumers/accumulators/exchangers are internationalized, compositors, moving in shared channels of mobilization at common rates of speed in the same time-frames. This world of globalization, as Friedman claims, "turns all friends and enemies into ‘competitors'."43

Now there are so many valued centers of timely generation intent upon fixing their own timely equilibria of energy and motion in omnipolitan governmentality to find "the right disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end,"44 that most managers of global businesses no longer pace their sense of right disposition, convenient ends or even useful things in narrow national terms. The Gillette Corporation's chair, Alfred M. Zeien, claims, for example, that his firm does not "find foreign countries foreign," and, as a result, it plans not "to tailor products to any marketplace, but to treat all marketplaces the same."45 This tailoring of marketplaces to products as fast as tastes change, or can be changed, is the fast acting power of glocality. Transnational businesses, media groups, crime syndicates, and ideological blocs all are feeding these tendencies in a globalized flexible regime of flow-focused governmentality as each advances their own polyglot imaginations of convenience in seeking nonstatal ends out of the right disposition of things.

The globalized kineformation of commodities merge as part and parcel with major shifts which no longer "isolate the economy as a specific sector of reality,"46 but rather generalize economics as the universal totality of what is real. Once there, deterritorialized fast capitalist agencies, and not territorialized nation-states, increasingly generate the disciplines and/or delights needed "to manage a population" not only as a "collective mass of phenomena, the level of its aggregate effects," but also "the management of population in its depths and details."47 Individuals, in turn, judge their personal success more often by the goods and services shared by the other "successful fifth" of global coaccelerants than by the state of the "failed four-fifths," who while they might still be perhaps fellow citizens, they are no longer commotive contemporaries riding on the same fast capitalist tracks in global flows.48

Glocalities melt all that was once locally solid into air so that their displaced particles might mix and match with all of the other fluidized particularities speeding along in global flows. As one key architects of these changes asserts, the most rational form of global order will be one of complete borderlessness. That is, the state apparatus should do nothing to retard global flows; it should instead serve as an active accelerant, changing "so as to: allow individuals access to the best and cheapest goods and services from anywhere in the world; help corporations provide stable and rewarding jobs anywhere in the world regardless of the corporation's national identity; coordinate activities with other governments to minimize conflicts arising from narrow interest; avoid abrupt changes in economic and social fundamental."49 Here, again, value as the ease of access by people to things and time as the speed of things getting to people drives the globalizing impact of omnipolitan development.

The speed-bodies of glocalized life can be tracked to disclose how the megametaphorics shape the spaces in which this speed-centered building, dwelling, thinking happen. The means of acceleration--material and symbolic--produce differential outcomes for the fast and slow classes whose power, status, wealth, labor, and information vary with their relations of access to, use of, and possession by accelerative forces. Co-acceleration--at fast, slow or stalled rates--generate shared consciousness or brake against mismatched awarenesses. Those outside of shared time warps or spatial distortions soon prove either not to be like us or to simply not like us. Indeed, globalization becomes the thought and action of people caught up in kinematic social formations engaged constantly in acts of fast acting conflict or cooperation. Reich asks "who is 'us'?," and his answer obviously is everyone "on the go" transnationally, not anyone "stuck in place" nationally. For the globalized, "to disconnect is to disinform oneself."50 Shared speed becomes like a shared lifeworld, and it forms new agents from these accelerated states of globalized consciousness.

IV. "Sustainability"

A political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about "sustainability" is a doxic notion that reimagines society like Nature, or, at least the Nature of ecology. It first surfaced in the 1960s, but this notion has become far more pronounced in the 1980s and 1990s. Few of its doxic effects take the form of general theory, because sustainability practices mostly have been steered instead toward analysis, stock taking, and classification in more quantitative forms of planetary accountancy. The project of "sustainability" in the U.S., whether one speaks of sustainable development, growth or use in relation to Earth's ecologies, embodies another set of doxic assumptions about the world's life processes as the American state talks about a rational harmonization of its political economy with global ecology as a form of green geo-politics.

Taking "sustainability" into account creates discourses about the world whose goals derive not only from civic morality, but also from industrial rationality. Indeed, as all nations face "the limits of growth" or see "the population bomb" ticking away, ecologies became something more than what one must judge morally. They are transformed into world-defining processes the state must administer. Sustainability, then, has evolved into "a public potential; it called for management procedures; it had to be taken charge of by analytical discourses," as Washington recognized that its environmentalized manifestations are "a police matter" -- "not the repression of disorder, but an ordered maximization of collective and individual forces."51

Discourses of "geo-economics," as they have been expounded by Robert Reich, Lester Thurow, or Edward Luttwak, as well as rearticulations of "geo-politics" in an ecological register, as they have been developed by President Bill Clinton or Vice President Al Gore, all express doxological understandings of the world's economic and political importance as a site for the orderly utilization of many material resources. Geo-economics, for example, transforms through military metaphors and strategic analogies what hitherto were regarded as purely economic concerns into national security issues of wise resource use and sovereign property rights. Government manipulation of trade policy, state support of major corporations, or public aid for retraining labor all become vital instruments for "the continuation of the ancient rivalry of the nations by new industrial means."52 The relative success or failure of national economies in head-to-head global competitions are taken by geo-economics as the definitive register of any one nation-state's waxing or waning international power as well as its rising or falling industrial competitiveness, technological vitality, and economic prowess. In this context, the doxa have many believe that public considerations of globalization, sustainability or virtualization cannot be ignored, or even be granted only meaningless symbolic responses, in the quest to mobilize as many political resources as possible.

Geo-economics accepts the prevailing form of mass market consumerism as it presently exists, defines its rationalizing managerial benefits as the public ends that advanced economies ought to seek, and then affirms the need for hard discipline in elaborate programs of productivism, only now couched within rhetorics of highly politicized national competition, as the means for sustaining mass market consumer lifestyles in nations like the United States. Creating economic growth, and producing more of it than other equally aggressive developed and developing countries, is the sine qua non of "national security" in the 1990s. As Richard Darman, President Bush's chief of OMB declared after Earth Day in 1990, "Americans did not fight and win the wars of the twentieth century to make the world safe for green vegetables."53 Geo-economic readings of world politics also have, in turn, sparked debates about the sustainability of these life styles, which have even led the Clinton administration to embrace sustainability doxa as policy rhetoric.

The presidential commitment to deploying American power as an environmental protection agency has waxed and waned over the past quarter century, but in 1995 President Clinton made ecological sustainability an integral part of his global doctrine of "engagement." Indeed, "to reassert America's leadership in the post-Cold War world," and in moving "from the industrial to the information age, from the Cold War world to the global village," President Clinton asserted "We know that abroad we have the responsibility to advance freedom and democracy--to advance prosperity and the preservation of our planet....in a world where the dividing line between domestic and foreign policy is increasingly blurred....Our personal, family, and national future is affected by our policies on the environment at home and abroad. The common good at home is simply not separate from our efforts to advance the common good around the world. They must be one in the same if we are to be truly secure in the world of the 21st century."54

By acting as an agency of environmental protection on a global level, the United States sees itself under Clinton and Gore as reasserting its world leadership following the Cold War. As the world's leader, in turn, America stipulates that it cannot advance economic prosperity and ecological preservation without erasing the dividing lines between domestic and foreign policy. In the blur of the coming Information Age and its global villages, the United States cannot separate America's common good from the common goods of the larger world. To be truly secure in the 21st century, each American's personal, family, and national stake in their collective future must be served through the nation's environmental policies. Secretary of State Christopher confirmed President Clinton's engagement with the environment through domestic statecraft and diplomatic action: "protecting our fragile environment also has profound long-range importance for our country, and in 1996 we will strive to fully integrate our environmental goals into our diplomacy--something that has never been done before."55

Because "the nations of the world look to America as a source of principled and reliable leadership," new leading principles and reliable sources for this authority need to be discovered.56 And, to a certain extent, they can be derived from a tactics of normalization rooted within the vague codes of ecological sustainability. From President Nixon's launch of the nation's Environmental Protection Agency to President Clinton's global engagement of America as the world's leading agency of environmental protection, one can see the growing importance of a green governmentality in the state's efforts to steer, manage, or legitimate all of its various policies.

Repudiating "the end of history" thesis, Secretary of State Warren Christopher announced at a major address hosted by the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University that the United States must cope instead with "history in fast-forward" since it now faces "threats from which no border can shield us--terrorism, proliferation, crime, and damage to the environment."57 Such "new transnational security threats" endanger "all of us in our interdependent world,"58 so the United States will step forward in the post-Cold War era to combat these threats as an integral part of its anti-isolationist policies. As it runs headlong ahead on fast-forward, the United States pledged through its Secretary of State to reduce greenhouse gases, ratify biodiversity conventions, and approve the Law of the Sea. Even so, President Clinton, Vice President Gore, and Secretary Christopher also recognized "how we can make greater use of environmental initiatives to promote larger strategic and economic goals....helping our environmental industrial capture a larger share of a $400-billion global market."59

Consequently, Secretary Christopher directed the staffs of Global Affairs, Policy Planning, and the New Bureau of Oceans, International Environment, and Scientific Affairs "to identify for environment, population, and resource issues affect key U.S. interests"60 during February 1996. Along with naming a new Assistant Secretary for Oceans, International Environment, and Scientific Affairs, Christopher also ordered that each American embassy now have an environmental senior officer and all bureau and mission planning have an environmental elements in their agenda. As he told the House International Relations Committee, in 1996 things would change at the State Department, because he was "fully integrating environmental goals into our daily diplomacy for the first time" and "making greater use of environmental initiatives to promote our larger strategic and economic goals."61

These efforts to connect economic growth with sustainability, however, are stated most obviously in Vice President Al Gore's environmental musings. To ground his green geo-politics, Gore argues that "the task of restoring the natural balance of the Earth's ecological system" could reaffirm America's longstanding "interest in social justice, democratic government, and free market economics."62 The geo-powers unlocked by this official ecology might even be seen as bringing "a renewed dedication to what Jefferson believed were not merely American but universal inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."63 At another level, however, Gore takes his own spiritual-religious opposition to geo-economics to new heights, arguing that America's new strategic goals after the Cold War must be centered upon sustainability to reestablish "a natural and healthy relationship between human beings and the earth," replacing the brutal exploitation of Nature with an "environmentalism of the spirit."64

Gore's confounding of domestic and foreign policies through sustainability, then, flows into a six-point course of action that necessitate: 1) stabilizing the world population, 2) deploying appropriate technologies, 3) devising techniques of ecological accounting to audit the production of all economic "goods" and ecological "bads," 4) imposing new regulatory frameworks to make the plan a success, 5) reeducating the global populace about environmental necessities, and, finally, 6) establishing models of sustainable development. Because there are no other institutional entities--the UN, OECD, or NATO--with the muscle for performing the heavy lifting needed to manage the global environment, according to Gore, "the responsibility for taking the initiative, for innovating, catalyzing, and leading such an effort, falls disproportionately on the United States."65

As the world's leading capitalist economy, Gore concludes "the United States has a special obligation to discover effective ways of using the power of market forces to help save the global environment."66 And, in the final analysis, ecological sustainability boils down to a new form of economic rationality to remake world politics. It is "a search for the lowest-cost method of reducing the greatest amount of pollution" in the turnover of production processes.67 Almost magically, sustainable development becomes primarily an economic, and not merely an environmental, calculation. The initiatives taken by businesses to prevent pollution, reduce waste, and maximize energy efficiencies are to be supported as world remaking programs. But, in taking these steps, world businesses reaffirm most existing premises of technology utilization, managerial centralization, and profit generation now driving advanced corporate capitalism.

These megametaphorics are not propounded only to preserve Nature, mollify green consumers, or respect Mother Earth; they also enhance corporate profits, national productivity, and state power. The "e-factor" is not merely ecology--it also is efficiency, excellence, education, empowerment, enforcement, and economics. As long as implementing ecological changes in business means implementing an alternative array of instrumentally rational policies, like finding lower-cost methods of energy use, supply management, labor utilization, corporate communication, product generation or pollution abatement, sustainability has tremendous world remaking potential. Gore's new stewardship through sustainable development may not be strictly ecological, but these megametaphorics strive to cultivate a sense, at least, of being environmentally responsible. Such rhetorics permit real differences to become a like in working "deliberately and carefully, with an aim toward long-term cultural change, always with an eye toward the bottom line, lest you get frustrated and discouraged in the process" since these "environmentally responsible businesses can be both possible and profitable."68

V. "Virtualization"

The rapidity of change in the digital domains of the Internet is widely acknowledged in the megametaphorics of the present. To write about it, or reconsider the effects of its current mix of functionalities, is a hazardous enterprise, but the digerati rise to the challenge. Still, their analysis seems doomed to lag far behind the event horizon where the latest actions are happening. These changes cannot be quantified easily, and their inherent qualities are ephemeral. So much of what is written about the Net, then, must necessarily write instead about what already is written on the Net. No one really knows what its effects are. Consequently, one tries to understand what many believe its effects have been, might be or should be, because these widely circulated doxological beliefs now constitute a considerable stock of net effects in-and-of themselves. In this respect, virtualization is partly the effects of computer networks, digital discourses, and online organizations on everyday life and partly the rush of rhetoric about what many think those effects are. Their doxic effects are widespread and influential.

By repeating how technologies have "anonymous histories" that shape space, temper time, and package performance apart from the conscious intention of their users, the figure of virtualization in computer-mediated communications over information networks begins to respecify how political subjectivity changes in digital environments.69 Most importantly, digital networks seem to create new notions of alikeness in operational domains and cultural discourses far beyond the scope and method of how territorial states work now. In this manner, the doxa hold that "netizenship" is potentially far more than "e-citizenship," because virtual life on the Net is much more, and far less, than simply living in any city, polis or state.

As the post-IPO Internet address retailer, Network Solutions, suggests in its many cable television ads, the Net's bitscapes are today's equivalent of the Wild West—a telematic terra nullis in which anyone can grab their "dot coms" and get rich. This new commercialization of virtual life is transforming the hyperrealities of cyberspace.70 The old interface values of disembodied subjectivity, distributed community, and cybernetic play inherited from the early days of the Net are rapidly being eclipsed by newer interface values tied to reimagining cyberspace as hyperreal estate, virtual markets, and online e-commerce. And, in many ways, the megametaphorics of virtualization shown netizens as he or she who recognizes these shifts, leverages their potential for increased and political power, and imagines how online infostructures might constitute new forms of economic commonwealth. Moreover, the online

Nations of citizens always have been, on the one hand, produced in particular media regimes and market circumstances. The construction of single mother tongues, rigid territorial borders, and cohesive mass populations, as Anderson argues, evolved alongside the development of older megametaphorics circulated by a national press.71 Print capitalism was the material foundation of those nation-states, and "nations are therefore nations of people influenced by the same newspapers."72 Cybernetic nodes for virtualized netizens, on the other hand, are being generated out of other media regimes and market circumstances, which are tied to telematic virtualizations. Virtualization, then, evolves around nodes of interest where flows of digital attention are influenced by the same webs of hypertextual tools, links, and codes.73 Among nations, one has a "home" group or ground by virtue of birth and development in an off-line place with other real subjects. Around nodes, one builds "home" pages by organizing virtual objects at specific online sites.

Framed in hypertext and caught in capitalist commerce, hypertextual capitalism is the material foundation of virtual identities. As Turkle notes,

On the Web, the idiom for constructing a "home" identity is to assemble a "homepage" of virtual objects that correspond to one's interests. One constructs a homepage by composing or "pasting" on it words, images, and sounds, and by making connections between it and other sites on the Internet or the Web. Like the agents in emergent AI, one's identity emerges from whom one knows, one's associations, and connections. People link their homepage to pages about such things as music, paintings, television shows, cities, books, photographs, comic strips, and fashion models....If we take the homepage as a real estate metaphor for the self, its decor is postmodern: Its different rooms with different styles are located on computer all over the world but through one's efforts, they are brought together to be of a piece.74

Hypertextality is virtualization's most crucial practice, unifying many disparate elements into the digital objects that now carry individual identities, express self-invented biographies, and articulate a new mode for societalizing subjectivities virtually. Virtualized unities are formed on the fly in flows of commercial products and services, whose signs and substances now shape the innumerable connections, associations, and knowledges of postmodernized DIY individualization. With the pull of browsers, one builds his/her own quasi-social, ultra-selfish pastiche of fragments from the public sphere in which Lycos, AOL, Netscape or The Wall Street Journal will connect you only with information that you pre-select as what you want to see.75 Virtual megametaphorics assume the emergence of netizens, who work as free-lancers amidst social instability, beyond local ties, but continuously laced together just-in-time with others all over the world by networks of data.

The doxa suggest that this hyperindividuation of virtualization also will recast personal and social agency. Whereas nations once mandated modes or behavior and thought, virtual networks presume an individual "as actor, designer, juggler and stage director of his own biography, identity, social networks, commitments and convictions. Put in plain terms, 'individualization' means the disintegration of the certainties of industrial society as well as the compulsion to find and invent new certainties for oneself and others without them."76 In some sense, informationalization forces all to become electronic existentialists as the standard biographies of older industrial societies become chosen biographies, DIY histories, autogenic experiences out in the flows of capital, data, labor, and product. Beck observes, "to use Sartre's term, people are condemned to individualization....whatever a man or woman was and is, whatever he or she thinks or does, constitutes the individuality of that particular person."77

At the cybernetic interface, personal workstations, mainframe accounts, and network addresses all methodically individuate nodal interactions, and these realities are reflected back in everyday rhetorics of virtualization. Compaq sells itself as a new economy of scope standing by on-line 7x24x52, waiting to fill each individual's "custom-built" machine order. "Get the technology," Compaq promises, "YOU WANT any way you want TO GET IT."78 Gateway 2000 matches Compaq's pledge to individuals with its even more comprehensive "Your:)Ware" packaged suite of computer products, ranging from custom-made machines and software bundles to ISP connections and guaranteed trade-up programs.79 PeopleSoft realizes individuals now must construct their own private enterprises, capital assets, and business communities, and do it also increasingly on-line. Hence, it promises individuals continuous rationalization support for "your supply chain," because it is PeopleSoft's promise: "We work in your world."80

Individual identity in worlds managed by PeopleSoft, accessed through Your:) Ware, and sustained through e-business becomes one of multiple personality (dis)order. On the one hand, a strongly centered nation-state opens up into many decentered virtual webs. This can disorder the national character of homogenous political communities, and any single individual is condemned to constitute themselves out of activities, accesses, and assets opened to them online, which will reorder the individual biography of increasingly disordered national citizen-subjects. And, on the other hand, real individuals with one relatively immobile, geographically emplaced, and psychosocially definite identity behind given national boundaries can become, once, online, much more mobile, displaced, and indefinite as they reinvent themselves as virtual agents. The welfare state's experiments in conditioning people, as Beck claims, for "ego-centered ways of life" pays off in spades online as particular persons morph their way through the day as multiple personalities.81 Such modes of life of the screen raise tremendous identity questions for netizens, because multiple personalities can be quite disordering as well as very ordered. The waning stability of uniform national identities in place is captured by Turkle's endorsement of pluralized nodal identities online:

Every era constructs its own metaphors for psychological well-being. Not so long ago, stability was socially valued and culturally reinforced. Rigid gender roles, repetitive labor, the expectation of being in one kind of job or remaining in one town over a lifetime, all of these made consistency central to definitions of health. But these stable social worlds have broken down. In our time, health is described in terms of fluidity rather than stability. What matters most now is the ability to adapt and change--to new jobs, new career directions, new gender roles, new technologies.82

Virtual communities anchored to telematic interaction provide Turkle with the new normative structures to enforce these normalizing expectations. Stable points of subjectivity are like fluidized objects of many flexible geometries. They now apply in societalized online environments "not only to human mental and physical spheres, but also to the bodies of corporations, governments, and businesses....in these environments, people either explicitly play roles (as in MUDs) or more subtly shape their online selves. Adults learn about being multiple and fluid--and so do children."83 As De Kerckhove observes, all of these aesthetic traces are signs of nodality reshaping territory, identity, and power:

There is no horizon on the Net, only expansions and contractions, and our relationship to it begins a formidable expansion of psychological size. The loss of a clear sense of boundaries, the expansion of our mental frameworks by satellite, the on-line redistribution of our powers of action, all of these add up to a confused body image. We can't be absolutely sure anymore were we begin and where we end.84

The recalibration of normalization routines around flexibility and plurality in networks moves Turkle to see virtualization "as a space for growth."85 She recognizes, like Robert Jay Lifton, the worth of a "protean self" for avoiding either "a dogmatic insistence on unity" or a "return to systems of belief, such as religious fundamentalism, that enforce conformity."86

The societalization of new ways of life around virtual realities in such doxa, then, essentially turn citizenship, taken in the modes of conventional liberalism, traditional nationalism or religious fundamentalism, into a monopersonality disorder before the new multiple personality order. For Turkle, the netizen's digital being, which emerges in real life from virtual life, "is capable, like Proteus, of fluid transformations but is grounded in coherence and moral outlook. It is multiple but integrated."87 In defiance of American First!ers, like Pat Buchanan, France First!ers, like Claude Le Pen, or Russia First!ers, like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Turkle finds the new bottomline for netizens: "You can have a sense of self without being one self."88 Moreover, online practices and theories carried by "experiences in MUDs, on the WELL, on local bulletin boards, on commercial network services, and on the World Wide Web" all are bring these netropolitan realities home.89

At the virtual intersections of network places, and connectivity spaces, as Gergen claims, "our range of social participation is expanding exponentially. As we absorb the views, values, and visions of others, and live out the multiple plots in which we are enmeshed, we enter a postmodern consciousness."90 Whether or not this is postmodern perhaps is less clear, but sharply bounded personal identities and clearly bordered social communities of territorial citizenship are increasingly in doubt on-line. Actually, the multimediations of the digital domain, as Deibert affirms, carry a functional bias toward decentered and fragmented identities, "and away from modern conceptions of the autonomous sovereign individual, "in which cyberspace generates "a plurality of 'worlds' and multiple 'realities,' each of which is contingent on social constructions, or 'language-games' that constitute and orient the field of experience."91

Turkle's musings about "life on the screen" easily supports such visions of multiculturalized virtuality among the netizenry of on-line environments. In cyberspace, identity is often a series of multiple roles in which society and community become composite materials concocted out of various codes, discourses, and games. Multiculturalized menus for virtuality, then, "blur the boundaries between self and game, self and rule, self and simulation" such that as one player observes, "'you are what you pretend to be...you are what you play.' But people don't just become who they play, they play who they are or who they want to be or who they don't want to be."92

These tendencies, as Turkle suggests, add up to netizens "taking things at their interface value" in which "people are increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real."93 Therefore, the on-line emulations of territoriality, sovereignty or community, which might be generated out of computer-mediated communications, mean that "programs are treated as social actors we can do business with, provided that they work."94 If people treat computers "in ways that blur the boundary between things and people," then all of those things and people, which once had fixed boundaries and clear distinctions, begin to blur along many of their historical borders as well.95 Telematic networks, while not quite political entities, are increasingly taken at their interface values as their representations of reality and lifestyle sites become more openly accepted as framing/composing/building what is "the real" by nodes in the network. Provided that these virtual relations work, and now they mostly are when it comes to making money, trading shares, writing letters, broadcasting television, calling overseas, organizing partisans, designing products, playing games, or tracking business, the virtualization of individual and social life in the digital domain blurs the distinctions between local and global, domestic and foreign, real life and virtual life, of homeplace and marketplace.

VI. Summary: Doxosophies and Doxosophers in Politics

This analysis suggests megametaphorical terms serve as some of the key myths carrying forward the processes of modernization today as they fill popular doxologies with fables of alikeness and difference. Myths create belief; and, in being believed, such myths can become reality in the on-going tussles of social forces. By being believed, for those whose deeds actuate and affirm their content, megametaphors cannot be ignored. And, within many established institutional regmies, megametaphorics serve as powerful screens whose filters are manipulated by inorganic intellectuals and vested interests to further the alikenesses of globalization, sustainability, and virtualization.

All the events that megametaphors cast as unfolding in the economy and society are not things that necessarily exist as such. Rather the perception of their existence gains greater focus in the frames suggested by such polysemic terms. They outline more determinate visions of what can be, should be, and will be done. For many people, believing in the doxosophies derived from such megametaphors, following the programmatic designs of inorganic intellectuals who propound such beliefs, and then accepting their doxic effects in thought and action, somehow all lead to even more of the same being done. Megametaphor, therefore, can be a tool of psychosocial domination as well as the means for ontopolitical interpretation. Doxic constructs plow open the fields of interpretative interaction where ideas can link up with institutions. Those institutions, in turn, remediate ideas so fully that the symbolic order actuates and affirms them in other realms of psychological and social behavior.96

Therefore, one cannot dismiss such megametaphorics as nothing but rhetoric. Their doxic effects quickly insinuate themselves into both official policy and critical analysis through the work of doxosophers, like Robert Reich, Al Gore or Sherry Turkle, as well as corporate and government executives, like Bill Clinton, Warren Christopher or Bill Gates. In this respect, the doxosophies of neo-liberal markets, green capitalism, and virtual organizations are turning into a concrete neo-liberal utopia that, as Bourdieu claims, now,

generates a potent belief, ‘free trade faith,' not only among those who live from it materially such as financiers, big businessmen, etc., but also those who derive from it their justifications for existing, such as the senior civil servants and politicians who deify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency, who demand the lifting of the administrative or political barriers that could hinder the owners of capital in their purely individual pursuit of maximum individual profit instituted as a model of rationality, who want independent central banks, who preach the subordination of the national states to the demands of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of all regulations on all markets, starting with the labor market, the forbidding of deficits and inflation, generalized privatization of public services, and the reduction of public and welfare spending.97

The alikenesses spun up from these beliefs are continuously displayed in the spectacles of global media as they cover the common efforts of all "those high representatives of the state who abase the dignity of their position by bowing before the bosses of multinationals, Daewoo or Toyota, or competing to charm Bill Gates with their smiles and gestures of complicity."98

A world where one asks, "what are world politics?," is both an axis for analysis as well as a domain of decision that many social forces -- individuals and groups -- work to control and transform. These tendencies lead to continuous change and constant conflict among the same forces struggling to redirect society at large. Those who dominate the world exploit their positions to their advantage; yet, they also face the resistance, questioning, and challenge of those who are dominated and who would become new dominant forces. Looked at by themselves, megametaphors may seem somewhat colorless. When one, however, hears such "ready-made phrases all day," as Bourdieu worries, they become a doxosophy, or "a whole philosophy and a whole worldview which engender fatalism and submission."99 Few things are more pressing than the disposition of the world in such megametaphors, because they circulate widely in political rhetorics, economic arguments or cultural controversies. This fact alone turns them into key strategic assets for anyone who is intent upon prevailing in these struggles. Their doxic effects must not be discounted.

The megametaphors remediate the most common modes of interpretation, as they now prevail in the world, in language that spins particular words -- like globalization, sustainability, and virtualization –- into either important chokepoints or major right-of-ways for the flows of political discourse. This study has only touched a few of the peaks protruding from the fog rising over these rhetorical battles. Metaphors cannot be ignored, because they are basic rhetorical tools of politics for both the producers of world constructs as well as the construction of the world product. National community and cultural identity are being riven by deep changes, which megametaphorics continue to reflect as well as generate. Without the megametaphors of globality, sustainability or virtuality, and their doxological understanding by inorganic intellectuals and institutional decision-makers, the politics of what is called globalization, sustainable development, and virtualization would not be the same.

References

1. To sample this range of responses, see James M. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and, Timothy W. Luke, "Discourses of Disintegration, Texts of Transformation: Re-Reading Realism in the New World Order," Alternatives, 18 (1993), 229-258.

2. For some representative examples of these rhetorical formations at work, see Robert Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Outselves for 21^st Century Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1991); Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992); and, Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Touchstone, 1997). (Retour au texte)

3. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiii-xxv

4. Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954), 95.

5. For additional guidance on this point from a variety of perspectives, see Charles Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955); Algirdas Julien Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); and Eugene Halton, Bereft of Reason: On the Decline of Social Thought and Prospects for its Renewal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). (

6. For a more detailed discussion of ontopolitical concerns, see William Connolly, "The Irony of Interpretation," The Politics of Irony: Essays in Self-Betrayal, ed. D. W. Conway and J. E. Seery (New York: Routledge, 1992); and, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

7. See R. B. J. Walker, "The Antipolitics of Clayoquot Sound," Western Political Science Association annual meetings, Seattle, Washington (March 25-27, 1999), 4.

8. See Timothy W. Luke, "Governmentality and Contra-Governmentality: Rethinking Sovereignty and Territoriality After the Cold War," Political Geography, 15, no. 6/7 (1996), 491-507.

9. Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 54.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., 55.

12. For further discussion of doxa in social interaction, see Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 39-63.

13. To contrast "organic" with "inorganic" intellectuals, see Antonio Gramsci, Selections of the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 101-133; Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 112-141; and, Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York: The New Press, 1998), 29-59.

14. Ibid., 7.

15. Ibid.

16. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1960), 27-43.

17. Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason, 81.

18. Ibid., 8.

19. Ibid.

20. Michel Foucault, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 97.

21. Ibid., 100.

22. Ibid., 102.

23. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1980), 146.

24. Bourdieu, In Other Words, 55.

25. See Robert Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth (New York: Random House, 1996).

26. Reich, Work of Nations, 8. Also see Hans-Peter Martin and Harald Schumann, The Global Trip: Globalization & the Assault on Democracy & Prosperity (London: Zed Press, 1998).

27. Paul Virilio, Open Sky (London: Verso, 1997), 75.

28. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), ix.

29. See Reich, Work on Nations, 243-315; and, Thomas Friedmann, The Lexus and The Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), ix-xix.

30. Friedman, Lexus, 8, 9, and 11.

31. See Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Times Books, 1995); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); and, Ben Agger, Fast Capitalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). These tendencies also have been described as "space of flows." See Manuel Castells, The Informational City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

32. Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 43-51. (Retour au texte)

33. Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 23.

34. For additional discussion, see William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 11-53.

35. Virilio, Art of the Motor, 36; and, Open Sky, 74.

36. Timothy W. Luke, "At the End of Nature: Cyborgs, 'Humachines,' and Environments in Postmodernity," Environment and Planning A, 29 (1997), 1367-1380.

37. Greider, One World, Ready or Not, 50-51.

38. See Paul Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 1993), 47-64.

39. Timothy W. Luke and Geároid Ó. Tuathail, "On Videocameralistics: The Geopolitics of Failed States, the CNN International, and (UN) Governmentality," Review of International Political Economy, 4(1997), 709-733.

40. Reich, Work of Nations, 111.

41. Ibid., 114.

42. Ibid., 112.

43. Friedman, Lexus, 11.

44. Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 93.

45. Cited in Louis Uchitelle, "Gillette's World View: One Blade Fits All," The New York Times, January 3, 1994, C3.

46. Foucault, "Governmentality," 102.

47. Ibid. (Retour au texte) Work of Nations, 268-300.

49. Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), appendix.

50. Cited in John Seabrook, "Rocking in Shangri-La," The New York Times, October 10, 1994, 64-78.

51. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 24-25. For more elaboration of why state power must guarantee environmental security, see Norman Myers, Ultimate Security: The Environmental Basis of Political Stability (New York: Norton, 1993).

52. Edward Luttwak, The Endangered American Dream: How to Stop the United States from Becoming a Third-World Country and How to Win the Geo-Economic Struggle for Industrial Supremacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 52. James Fallows pursues a similar line in his More Like Us: Making America Great Again (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989).

53. Cited in Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962-1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 77.

54. President Bill Clinton, "Address at Freedom House, October 6, 1995 [A White House Press Release]," Foreign Policy Bulletin (November/December, 1995), 43.
55. Secretary Warren Christopher, "Leadership for the Next American Century," U.S. Department of State Dispatch, 7, no. 4 (January 22, 1996), 12.
56. Ibid., 9

57. Ibid., 11.

58. Ibid., 12.

59. Ibid., 12.

60. "International Environmental and Resource Concerns," U.S. Department of State Dispatch, 7, no. 11 (March 11, 1996), 107.

61. Secretary Warren Christopher, "Meeting Our Nation's Needs: Providing Security, Growth and Leadership for the Next Century," U.S. Department of State Dispatch, 7, no. 14 (April 1, 1996), 160.

62. Gore, Earth in the Balance, 270. For a typical expression of sustainability discourse as a legitimation code, see John Young, Sustaining the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid., 218, 238.

65. Ibid., 304.

66. Ibid., 347.

67. Joel Makower, The E-Factor: The Bottom-Line Approach to Environmentally Responsible Business (New York: Times Books, 1993), 57.

68. For a recent defense of such reasoning, see Bruce Piasecki and Peter Asmus, In Search of Environmental Excellence: Moving Beyond Blame (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990).

69. See Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. (New York: Norton, 1948).

70. Andrew L. Shapiro, The Control Revolution: How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know (New York: Century Foundation, 1999), 169-230.

71. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 37-39.

72. Ulrich Beck, The Reinvention of Politics. Oxford: Polity Press, 1997), 72.

73. Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization. (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994).

74. Turkle, Life on the Screen, 258-259.

75. See Mark Slouka, War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality. New York: Basic, 1995.

76. Beck, Reinvention of Politics, 95.

77. Ibid., 96.

78. See Businessweek, August 10, 1998, 14.

79. See http://www.gateway2000.com .

80. See Businessweek, June 22, 1998, 83

81. Beck, Reinvention of Politics, 97.

82. Turkle, Life on the Screen, 255.

83. Ibid., 255-256.

84. Derrick De Kerckhove, Connected Intelligence: The Arrival of the Web Society (Toronto: Somerville, 1998), 38.

85. Turkle, Life on the Screen, 263.

86. Ibid., 258.

87. Ibid.

88. Ibid.

89. Ibid.

90. Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 15-16.

91. Ronald Deibert, Parchment, Printing, and Hpermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 187.

92. Turkle, Life on the Screen, 192.

93. Ibid., 23.

94. Ibid., 104.

95. Ibid., 102.

96. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 1-30.

97. Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance, 100-101.

98. Ibid., 102.

99. Ibid., 57.

Si c'est un homme
Primo Levi

Vous qui vivez en toute quiétude

Bien au chaud dans vos maisons,

Vous qui trouvez le soir en rentrant

La table mise et des visages amis,

Considérez si c'est un homme

Que celui qui peine dans la boue,

Qui ne connaît pas de repos,

Qui se bat pour un quignon de pain,

Qui meurt pour un oui pour un non.

Considérez si c'est une femme

Que celle qui a perdu son nom et ses cheveux

Et jusqu'à la force de se souvenir,

Les yeux vides et le sein froid

Comme une grenouille en hiver.

N'oubliez pas que cela fut,

Non, ne l'oubliez pas :

Gravez ces mots dans votre coeur.

Pensez-y chez vous, dans la rue,

En vous couchant, en vous levant;

Répétez-les à vos enfants.

Ou que votre maison s'écroule,

Que la maladie vous accable,

Que vos enfants se détournent de vous.

Tiré de Primo Levi, Si c'est un homme. trad. de l'italien par Martine Schruoffeneger, Paris, Julliard, 1987, p. 9.

Un intellectuel libéral dans un Québec conservateur

LAVERTU, Yves. Jean-Charles Harvey, le combattant, Montréal, Boréal, 2000, 462 p., ill.

Dans Jean-Charles Harvey, le combattant, Yves Lavertu trace le portrait d'un « homme d'âge mûr en colère » (p. 394-395). Il y est question du dur combat mené entre 1937 et 1942 par le directeur-fondateur de l'hebdomadaire Le Jour contre un bon nombre d'intellectuels canadiens-français séduits par les idéaux de la droite.

L'auteur a choisi de diviser en deux parties le récit de la colère de son héros attaché aux valeurs libérales. La première partie (chapitres I à V) couvre les années d'avant-guerre où le journaliste dénonce la montée du péril fasciste. Harvey s'efforce alors de mettre en lumière les dangers liés à la prise du pouvoir par les régimes totalitaires en Europe et met en garde tous ceux qui, parmi ses compatriotes, seraient tentés de donner leur appui à Mussolini, Hitler ou Franco. Antifasciste de la première heure, il ferraille avec Paul Bouchard de La Nation tandis que les coups de griffes se multiplient entre lui et Georges Pelletier du Devoir.

La seconde partie du récit (chapitres VI à XVI) s'ouvre sur le déclenchement de la Seconde Guerre mondiale et se clôt avec la fin de l'année 1942. Aux yeux du directeur du Jour, il s'agit d'une période cruciale de l'histoire de la civilisation occidentale : il faut gagner la guerre contre les forces des ténèbres qui menacent la liberté des individus et des nations. Pour ce faire, il exige notamment qu'on enferme les fascistes canadiens et en tout premier lieu leur chef, Adrien Arcand ; qu'on censure les opposants à l'effort de guerre et que le gouvernement fédéral explique mieux aux citoyens les enjeux de la conjoncture internationale. Lors de la crise de la conscription, Harvey reste fidèle à ses convictions et s'affiche en faveur de rendre obligatoire le service outre-mer. Selon lui, l'urgence de la situation exige un effort de guerre total de tous les Canadiens. Opposant farouche au maréchal Pétain et partisan du général de Gaulle, l'intellectuel s'engage aussi dans l'action en tissant des liens personnels avec les Français exilés qui luttent pour le relèvement de leur pays. Il joue même un petit rôle lors de la prise de Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon. En novembre 1942, le journaliste de combat applaudit la décision du gouvernement canadien de rompre ses relations avec le gouvernement de Vichy. À ce moment, sur la scène internationale, le vent tourne pour de bon en faveur des Alliés et, comme le soutient l'auteur, « Jean-Charles Harvey a livré son combat. » (p. 385)

Yves Lavertu raconte donc un chapitre agité de la longue vie de Jean-Charles Harvey (1891-1967) dont la justesse de vues s'est avérée dans la suite de l'histoire. L'étude de plus de 400 pages rappelle quelques faits qui ajoutent à la figure d'intellectuel anticonformiste en touchant l'homme : mondain, amateur du beau sexe, auteur d'un roman condamné par le cardinal Villeneuve, anticlérical, séparé, vivant par la suite en concubinage, ses enfants seront instruits dans des écoles anglaises du Québec et de l'Ontario. Tout cela a valu au fier combattant, gracieuseté de ses adversaires, auxquels d'ailleurs il répondait coup pour coup, une image tenace d'anti-Canadien français. Quant à Lavertu, il observe, à la suite des critiques des rédacteurs de l'hebdomadaire communiste Clarté, le fléchissement de l'ardeur du Jour dans la défense des droits des ouvriers. Cette baisse d'intérêt obéit aux exigences d'un soutien financier assuré peu après la fondation du journal par de riches industriels anglo-canadiens.

Écrit dans un style juste et alerte, le lecteur trouvera toutefois une utilisation fautive des expressions « par le biais » (p. 48, 139, 233, 345) et « à toutes fins utiles » (p. 129). Les coquilles, peu nombreuses dans la première partie du livre, s'additionnent dans la seconde partie (p. 169, 308, 332, 349, 366). L'épilogue reste sans aucun doute le passage le plus faible de ce récit captivant et bien documenté d'une tranche de vie d'un personnage fascinant. On sera certainement surpris de lire les deux ou trois dernières pages (voir « La mauvaise conscience », p. 399-401) dont le propos souffre d'un manque de nuance et paraît exagéré. Comment croire, en effet, au concept de totalitarisme soft ? N'est-ce pas difficile de penser que l'intelligentsia québécoise d'aujourd'hui a (toujours) peur d'Harvey ? Que vient faire à la toute fin de ce livre pourtant serein la référence à Esther Delisle et à son essai délirant ?

Alain Lacombe

Anti-Negroponte : Cybernetic Subjectivity in Digital Being and Time *

Timothy W. Luke

Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995)

As the key overseer at MIT's Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte has used his bestselling book, Being Digital, as the trailer for a transnational road trip on which he touts the exciting new online world as it is being invented in his digital workshops. Yet Negroponte's enthusiasm about these possibilities leads him away from raising other, more interesting, questions about digital being, particularly those having to do with the kind of subjectivity that becomes possible in cybernetic spaces. Save for his somewhat overdrawn exhalations over the shift from "atoms" to "bits" as the wave of the future (a shift that was first noticed fifteen years ago by the Tofflers in The Third Wave), he too sticks with the usual interpretive conceit: namely, that such new (wo)man/machine interfaces at the computer will simply reposition existing material styles and structures of social agency in a new cybernetic register, making everything more or less the same there (in "bits") as it is here (in "atoms"), only maybe more so, meaning essentially quicker, better, closer, sharper, etc. [ 1 ] Most practices and values will be as they are now, but in synchronous, material co-location; they will happen on-line as we realize how our net connections are creating a digital planet, new digital neighborhoods, a digital culture, flexible digital communities. I question Negroponte's assumptions about cybernetic subjectivity. When one looks at personal agency, social community, cultural dynamics, or power effects, things appear not at all as they do in the current computer interface. Consequently, I want to unwire Negroponte's positions about being digital in order to re-evaluate what differences are emerging, and then ask how we might reconsider these various new forms of digital being.

I: Some Varieties of Digital Being

Prefigurations of digital being perhaps already exist where any system of disciplined governmentality has constructed its own systems of subjectivity from the inscriptions of power/knowledge codes upon large populations of individual human beings. In such settings, one might witness the evolution of digital being in the shape of statistical populations (large pools of data) and statistical persons (individual data packets) of various magnitudes and dimensions. [ 2 ] In the ancient mainframe days of interfacing with the machine's CPU through mechanical card readers, popular wisdom summed up this sense of digital being in directing everyone not to bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate anyone. As subjectivities that can be variably configured out of data streams, which are forming, in turn, from the divergent discourses of their statistical manufacture, these digital beings are fabricated as operational traces within disciplinary force-fields in order to be managed as consumers, citizens, or clients by the bureaucratic apparatuses which become fused, or perhaps (con)fused, with them in all of their (wo)man/machine interactions. [ 3 ] Voters are imagined as machinic bundles of stable pre-formed preferences inclined to make choices in predictable, transitive, rational decisions. One only must find their "hot buttons," and then push them in political campaigns to get sufficient numbers of these digital beings to decide definitively on election day to favor or disfavor arrays of choices with a vote. Their lived reality for party campaigners is not a flesh-and-blood existence; it is instead merely a digital decision domain full of statistical traits, combining with this or that intense propensity to pull or not pull the voting lever with favor or disfavor.[ 4 ]

As Foucault suggests, these digital beings are now deeply embedded life forms, created by and for those disciplinary institutions that generate power over and knowledge of them by meshing groups of people in vectors of influence coursing through complex statistical spaces. Such digital beings have only indirect capabilities to control their identity and agency as subjects, because they tend to be captured inside of dedicated institutional domains built to exercise action at a distance in the service of government bureaucracies, partisan organizations, or corporate enterprises. [ 5 ] Perhaps such digital beings really are more "plant-like" in these manifestations, surviving as strange creatures inside the specialized, immobile, and fixed cyberbiomes of pooled data ecologies or focus group streams. In many ways, such statistical persons also are merely analog agencies set into motion by a technics of/for motorization, and their statistical surveillance by large formal organizations simply tries to model how and why they move and then manipulate where and when they will attain motion.[ 6 ]

The digital being that the technics of computerization elicit, on the other hand, may be much more "animal-like." Digitalization transmogrifies simple analog agents into very complex beings with serious possibilities for independent motion, location, activity, and understanding beyond those analogies contained by ordinary material culture. Physiocentric currents of thinking fixate upon naive notions of Nature and the embodied practices of wetware (organic human beings), in an attempt to understand any human being's natural existence in everyday life. Here, precybernetic categories of (meta)physics parcel up the world in the tired conventional bundles of Nature/Culture, Humanity/Technology, History/Society, Being/Time. Hardware (computers or telecom networks) and software (code constructs or packaged routines) are nothing more than inanimate objects, or "technology," that people, or "humanity," use as tools. As Negroponte senses, all inquiries into cybernetic subjectivity must challenge this physiocentrism of contemporary human beings as "atoms," inviting instead an openness to other realms of dimensionality, temporality, and activity that may be unfolding in hyperrealities as "bits" beyond the physiocentric space. [ 7 ]

As we listen to the cybertouts and infoprophets pound their forecasting drums in incessant punditry, we cannot help but notice that their sense of the cultural consequences of digital being is fairly unclear. So let us move beyond Negroponte, the Tofflers, George Gilder, and Douglas Rushkoff by distinguishing between three types of digital being, which allow us in turn to reason provisionally through some cybernetic actualities as well as to contemplate speculatively some telematic potentialities.

A. Digital Being: First Form

First, and still foremost in many discussions, digital being emerges out of actual human beings, whose analog/atomic actualities might be our way of experiencing the new cybernetic agency of working on and off line with complex computational and telecommunication networks. The fusion, or confusion, of (wo)man/machine in computer applications creates many new positionalizations of subjectivity as hardware-based (or is it perhaps "hardworn"?): calculator, reader, viewer, writer, composer, designer, communicator. The new subject positions may also be software-driven (or "softworn"): worker, voter, debater, inventor, observer. Without desktop video to visualize the actual operator's physical body, these forms of digital being now permit anyone to assume his/her/its own virtual personae, hyperembodiments, and agencies in various telematic contexts, as either bursts of pure electronic writing or displays of playful graphical ideogylphs.

The telecommuter, the lurker, the hacker, the web surfer, the newbie, the flamer, the sysop, or the hot chatterer all constitute new posts in/of existence. These positionalizations of individual agency are more than minor variants of conventional tool usage; they provide new social roles to invent and/or evade, as telepresences or as cyberagents, a dramaturgy of collective cultural activity. [ 8 ] The bandwidth constraining most network communications now more or less dictates that such digital beings represent themselves and deal with others through a textual interface. While some symbolic refunctioning of keyword orthography exists, digital beings exist on-line through point-to-point, many-to-many exchanges of spare prose that rarely fill one entire VDT screen. Graphics, scanned photos, voice, and desktop video can change the sociologies of this digital being, but most interactions still occur now within bursts of electronic writing. These mediations of one's identity as a digital being, in turn, delimit how such telepresence or hyperembodiment is experienced as a meaningful variety of personal existence. Interestingly enough, these forms of digital being are being widely used in various forms of cybercenotaphs. Using web sites, friends and relatives of the dead are digitizing the deceased in images, text, and audio, giving the now dead-and-gone an on-line resurrection.

This vision of digital being often veers back and forth between states of existence defined either by serious work roles or fantastic play roles. Highly mobile, symbolic-analyst workers, for example, envision telecommuting, usually seen best in slick telecom or modem advertisements, as liberation from office politics, bureaucratic drudgery, or fixed careers, because their laptops and modems link them into their physical workplaces as they perform new types of free, self-guided, pleasant labor at the beach or in the mountains. Digital being in this view is a liberated subjectivity able to go anywhere anytime anyway and still stay in productive, efficient work relations. Telecommuting, however, also can assume the more common form of off-shore, low-wage sweatshops where female data-entry or wordprocessing specialists move raw data or text by the keystroke through satellite switches to major corporations in Los Angeles, London, or Lyons. Sure, cybersexual subjectivity can be fantastic and playful. Because physical bodies often do not appear in the interface, digital sexual beings can choose to be male, female, young, old, heterosexual, homosexual, transsexual, etc. even if they are not. Virtual identity varies widely in cybersex, allowing anyone to do anything anytime anyway with anyone or anything. Digital being allows one to invent varying identities for work or play that can be adapted to different real and hyperreal contexts. Work contracts solicited over the Internet may be won by bidders who disguise their age/gender/race in virtual identities to compete more openly with bigger, different, richer competitors; sexual liaisons may occur between two digital beings invented, on the one hand, by a duo of bored junior female bankers and, on the other, by a group of male transvestites who simply enjoy playing vicariously the virtual parlor games of their digital beings. The liberating possibilities of these activities, however, cut more than one way. As the current controversy over cyberporn on the Internet indicates, digital being also can electronically mediate dark, violent urges from the nonvirtual world, as cyberporn is accessed by children, pedophiles find young victims in some BBS chat session, or murder is plotted in snuff stories for an adult MUD. Cybersex is not necessarily just play.

This kind of digital being as a significant positionalization of cybersubjectivity is becoming more interesting morally, politically, and socially, because so many real moves in human ethics presume face-to-face personal contact (like virtuous gestures or criminal acts) or materially embodied synchronous colocation (like politics or sex). Digital beings can create cybersubjective interactions that apparently satisfy their initiators in screen-to-screen "non-contact" or virtually disembodied asynchronous "dis-location." Libertarians assert we should be free to do anything in our own private sphere as long as it does not harm others. Do digital subjects inhabit personal spheres that conform to such ordinary notions of privacy? In the realm of digital being, what is harmed and how is it harmed? In virtual reality, what new legal, political, and cultural rules should guide hyperreal behavior? Might not digital beings of this sort be encouraged, for example, to press for teledemocracy in cybernetic referenda? Would voters approach it seriously, like real embodied civic voting, or mostly as play, like hyperreal on-line cybersex? Should digital beings who simply indulge in imagining acts of murder, rape, torture, or dismemberment to other digital beings in some kinky MUD be sanctioned somehow for their sociopathological digital acts? Would only new digital laws pertain here or would old laws need to be mapped over? And, then who would promulgate and enforce them? As Negroponte suggests, telepresence is and is not like a material presence. But should not digital beings expect similar ethical outcomes as "bits" from "atomic" categorical imperatives to operate in cyberspace? Will the moralities of material being fit digital being poorly, or will they finally complete themselves there?

B. Digital Being: Second Form

A second, and much less prominent variety of digital being is emerging out of software assemblies as computer designers push for "intelligent agency" by designing new personal services into hardware and code structures. Programming design has advanced quite significantly as new bioemulations or artificial lifeforms are being created to coevolve with people. This sort of digital being has developed with considerable rapidity and real diversity alongside computer machineries and networks. Looking at real computer systems, for example, one finds thousands of artificially generated organisms, like computer viruses, which essentially are digital parasites living off the hyperbiotic resources provided by computer hardware. Whether the environment is a diskette, a hard disk, a mainframe CPU, or a network server, these digital beings typically are self-reproducing pests whose life-forms depend upon adapting to data niches in the cyberenvironments of real computers. At the same time, artificial life designers create "virtual computers" within real computers, as a type of bioisolation lab, to generate new virtual organisms that will occupy only the virtual environments emulated by these isolation chambers. Here, digital being takes many forms: cellular automata, pattern machines, game artifacts, or genetic algorithms. Their vitalistic properties, in turn, can be controlled to prevent them from becoming viral parasites in real computer systems.

These digital beings are only made out of computer code, but increasingly they have many conventional accepted signs of life: intelligence, sentience, agency, prudence, creativity. What are these digital beings that now are beginning to thrive purely in cyberspaces? The (con)fusion of labor/machine in crude software packages such as "Bob" or "Wildfire" is creating post-zoological agents with many new locations of subjectivity: receptionist, mail sorter, batman, personal assistant, chamberlain, travel planner, executive secretary, research assistant, data analyst, pattern detector, symbolic analyst, communications operator, calendar keeper, life master. As these and other more advanced packages become individually customized by their users in particular cultural, familial, and historical practices, and as they perhaps become more sapient in their intelligence and liberated in their agency, one must ask what these digital beings are qua being? Are they purely dead, functional appliances, or does their intelligent agency somehow make them alive?

Such personal digital assistants (PDAs) may be much more than a gizmo, like Apple's Newton, but much less than a zoological lifeform, like a seeing-eye dog. Either way, as they evolve, they could indeed become a vital and permanent presence in many of our lives. In fact, as digital recorders with total omniscience, they could become the definitive chroniclers and masters of our lives inasmuch as their digital being mediates between us and other beings of all types. How will these digital beings be created, who will introduce them into our existence, what protections will they have, which ones will be empowered to do what in service of which ends, and when will they be terminated? When one's intelligent agent is directed to meet and negotiate with another's intelligent agent in a context of some moral and legal force (as envoys, dealmakers, and decisiontakers) will the digital being of those agents be regarded:

1) as dumb extensions of their owners, like servants, slaves or animals
2) as purely private property of their owners, again like slaves or animals
3) as quasi-autonomous subjects of employment by their owners, like bondsmen, or apprentices
4) or, as in-house chattel of computer networks, like voicemail systems or menu routines in software packages?

Are they virtual representatives with some modicum of their own preauthorized discretion, actual representatives carrying only our direct brief, or are they physical representatives simply standing in for remotely positioned human beings? Empowered to protect and serve their users/owners in cyberspace, will these intelligent agents be forced to give witness, endanger information, disclose secrets, reveal decisions, or provide access against their instructions? What rules would hold then: are they truly conversant, intelligent agents with some sort of legal protection? If so, what sort of rights might be extended to them and why? Or are they essentially dumb, dead boxes available for inspection at any time by anyone?

Musing about such cybernetic subjects may seem silly, because, after all, as Claus Emmeche argues, the intelligent agents generated by computational biology or cyberbioengineering can only be slaves to their masters. [ 9 ] Yet, is this entirely fair? Some cybernetic visionaries foresee a human life beyond the body, and here they are not talking about some future biomechanical resurrection of a human being's zoological wetware from a cryogenic deep freeze. As Hans Moravec at Carnegie-Mellon University dreams, why not transfer all of a living human being's memories, intelligence, agency, knowledge, and experience as sophisticated computer code onto chips or into software, recording perhaps even the living person's actual voice on a sound chip? [ 10 ] In such a case, does a living human being become another kind of PDA—a personified digital agency, a postbionic demonic avatar, or a previously-embodied digital angel? What would these humanoid digital beings be: merely bizarre simulacra of once zoological forms, or truly intelligent human agencies? A "brain death" in the body could be sublated by a new "brain life" on the net, creating unbelievable dilemmas for such cyberbiota betwixt and between postzoological notions of life and death, agency and property, identity and power, being and time.

While living beings cannot now migrate from carbon-based to silicon-based bodies, a kind of Jurassic Park-like resurrection of the once dead from the still crypts of an analog grave occurs everyday as morphing magic pulls bits of code from the amber suspension of old celluloid film stock, plastic LP records, or oxide audio tape. Mixed in morphing programs, simulated by sampling routines, colorized from chromatic computations, the crisp images of real bodies or rich echoes of actual voices long ago lost to real-time analog death return in Coca Cola commercials or Forest Gump-eries as golems ground together out of gigabytes of digital dust. [ 11 ] Now smart movies can cast living-dead digital actors in new supporting roles speaking in sampled voices and moving within morphed bodies alongside real actors. Smart recording studios can record music allowing us all to listen to Hanks Williams, Sr., Hank Williams, Jr., and maybe a Hank Williams, III sing a new digital ballad, just as Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole or John Lennon and the still-living Beatles all sing in real-time from cyberspace in hyperreal arrangements. New problems will arise here: who gets the royalties, where will the Oscar be mailed, and how can Betty Ford clinics survive when only cybercelebrities make movies or records?

C. Digital Being: Third Form

Least prominent in many discussions, a third kind of digital being is developing within smart machines as engineers attempt to androidize hitherto dumb/mute machines, transforming them into smart/talking digital beings. In this third form of digital being, computerized applications of intelligent agency are being substantively integrated into cybernetic and noncybernetic technical objects, giving many such artifacts most of the key classical traits of human life: consciousness, intelligence, personality, memory, speech, agency or experience. (Negroponte envisions a voice-activated interface with such appartuses in Being Digital 206-218.) The (con)fusion of the living being and the dead machine in a fabricated artifact generates another sort of parabionic agent with many new significant positionalizations of subjectivity: talking car, smart house, electronic wallet, knobotic terminal, autopiloting boat, prudent drone, brilliant munition, aware apartment, surveillant store, intelligent toilet. In other words, some of Negroponte's "bits" now occupy, or even animate, "atoms" in some very new and interesting ways.

Increasingly, one finds hitherto dumb mechanisms, which were once totally controlled by direct human manipulations of mechanical control surfaces built into machineries as manually-activated interfaces (like steering wheels, keyboards, push buttons, or handles) being given the powers of voice and/or speech recognition. Digital control plus digital speech synthesis and voice recognition are animating once dumb objects, permitting them to be voice-activated varieties of smart subjects. Unable to speak to first nature, human beings are combining elements from second and third nature into a new kind of digital being with embodied, active, and intelligent capabilities. Thus, entire new species of these digital beings can coevolve with human beings in quasi-objective/quasi-subjective networks which essentially provide the first formative ecologies for an android subjectivity in cyborg environments.

Clearly, these beings are neither data from Star Trek: The Next Generation nor even Star War's C3PO with all of their highly anthropomorphic representations of digital being. Instead they are more like the Starship Enterprise itself in old Star Trek Classic episodes, in which the space vehicle itself, with all of its on-board computer systems, human and nonhuman life supports, and sensing arrays, was an intelligent digital being with distributed intelligence built into its own machinic structure. With enough conscious agency to organize its own baseline guidance, and with a conversant consciousness and general analytic problem-solving powers all engineered into its own cybernetic systems, the Enterprise represents how complex a voice-activated tool can be. Such forms of digital being are beginning to coevolve with humans as unique new species. The closest approximation to this kind of intelligent technology today undoubtedly can be found in the decentralized, adaptative, flexible, collaborative, distributed, and expert systems in the network of networks composing the Internet structure.

This form of digital being is not science fiction; precursors already exist in many concrete prefigurations as intelligent materials, smart weapons, voice activated mechanisms, expert systems, or robotic complexes. Even without contact with human cybernetic subjectivity of the first type, these beings would have qualities of digital life with their strong emulations of consciousness, sentience, prudence, agency or personality in each of their cybermechanical structures. [ 12 ] As they exist in greater numbers more widely, we must consider all of the implications of coexisting with such digital beings. When genetic algorithms are coupled with robotic factories to turn out new generations of conversant computers, intelligent materials, or expert tools, then a truly new phylum of digital beings might well begin evolving quite apart from any direct human intervention.

Stealth warplanes, because of their intrinsically anti-aerodynamic designs, already must fly themselves "by wire," apart from their pilot's manipulations, to maintain any semblance of stability and lift, and their designers are testing whole new associated families of brilliant munitions that will decide on their own the specifics of when, what, who, why, and how to destroy without much, or any, direct human control from "friendly sides." Once brilliant weapons move beyond the ordinary smartness of "fire and forget" to an extraordinary brilliance in "find, figure, fix, finalize, fire, and then forget," then many civilian spin-offs will follow. Brilliant automobiles driven on smart roads to intelligent houses constructed for info-cities will begin to do everything they are told on their own initiative once empowered to act by their owners. The technological assumptions about becoming a digital being, as they are built into autonomous weapons systems like PROWLER (Programmable Robot Observer with Logical Enemy Response) or Brilliant Pebbles (a Star Wars ABM system), plainly will make other forms of autonomous artifacts, expert systems, or smart devices far more common coinhabitants with us in our social spaces. (DeLanda 160-78.)

II. The Coevolution of Digital Beings

Being telepresent has its costs, including an open acceptance of other telepresent interactions that makes a cybernetic receptionist almost essential. More and more digital socialization by human beings as digital im-personaters invites further and further elaboration of new digital networks of interaction, which, in turn, necessitates the creation of the second form of digital being to handle the traffic of the first form's digital existence. Intelligent agents evolve to cope with the human challenges of becoming and remaining a digital being; otherwise, much too much time is to be lost simply in sorting through network traffic and returning them in kind as first form digital beings.

Obviously, all of these digital beings are hybrids of human and nonhuman, subject and object, (wo)man and machine, consciousness and corporeality in a new cybernetic register. Without the networks of software and hardware that actually enable the forms of digital being projected by telecommuting or cybersex, this sort of cybersubjectivity could not emerge. Without routinized task serving codes or network links, the digital being of intelligent agents would have no environment in which to adapt themselves as a new form of existence. And, without the command/control/communication packages embedded into industrial artifacts to empower them with consciousness, voice, and memory, the digital being of smart artifacts would have no agency to evince. Nonetheless, whether they are hybrids or not, these digital beings all are coexisting with us in our modes of being and time, and our subjectivity is being enhanced and constrained by the qualities of our many interactions with them. Essentially, digital beings invite us again to amend Latour's ontological constitution as we uphold with its various traditional articles for defining how human and nonhuman, agent and structure, subject and object might confederate in our Nature/Culture contracts. (See Latour, We Have Never Been Modern 125-132.)

Once all of these digital beings are seen as existing per se, how will they be treated as beings? On a cultural plane, what legal status, political identity, economic agency, cultural structure, theological meaning will they have? They might represent monstrous beings living on the margins, surviving at the edge, adapting to the infrastructures inside and outside of material and virtual reality. With digital gills and analog lungs, virtual fins and material legs, these amphibious agencies now are rapidly coevolving with humanity. Will they reproduce as separate species? Or will even more fascinating hybrids emerge as telepresent human beings (first form) couple with smart space probes (third form) to explore extraterrestrial sites with remotely switched intelligent agents (second form)? Will material human beings nearing biological death (zero form) clone their personalities into software intelligent agents (second form) to take a hardline against real people virtually in the material world? Or will they, as with Moravec's software immortals (second form), really migrate into a smart house, talking car, or intelligent material (third form) to find new historical embodiments? Even more problematically, will any of these digital lifeforms clone themselves, combine with viruses, or commingle as code to create virtual mutations in unexpected reproductive lineages of an unanticipated artificial life in a purely postbionic zoology?

To think about digital being, we must begin (contra Negroponte) by redirecting our attention to what a subject is, where agency begins, how intelligence is understood, why memory counts, when speech matters, and who/what actually is a being of "bits" or "atoms." The Loebner Prize Competitions in Artificial Intelligence solicit artificial intelligence programs to pass the Turing test, which, as proposed by computer pioneer Alan Turing, asks a computer to impersonate a human being in a "conversation" conducted through text messages. If the computer convincingly emulated a human being, then it might be regarded as "intelligent." In one sense, one could argue that all three forms of these digital beings as quasi-objects/quasi-subjects are not really intelligent beings or even credible subjectivities, because the technologies are just not there yet to pass the Turing test. From another perspective, however, one can assert equally well that each of them already is indeed approaching a discrete type of subjectivity, maybe even a strange kind of inhuman intelligent being.

When they're not indulging the glib techno-optimism of Negroponte's Wired commentary, most existing cultural appraisals of digital being fail to improve upon Victorian monster fantasies about cyborg robots or demonic golems threatening some mystical human essence. Current political analyses of digital being cannot even figure out how to apply existing criminal codes to Internet MUDs, or intellectual property laws to ordinary software piracy. Historical awareness of digital beings, even if one adopts the omnipresent pose of De Landa's robot historian, clearly pales next to their anonymous proliferation in the workings of informational society. Perhaps some future historical preservationists will unpack the hard drives of old PCs to chronicle the doings of digital beings as telecommuting, cybersexed, hyperreal-estated lifeforms. Perhaps they will work to save the codes of some major personage's PDA as his or her biotronic Boswell still accidentally hums along on-line as a digital being years after the wetware who owned it dies. Perhaps they will struggle to restore the successive generations of intelligent agency activating a 1990s-era smart house after many generations of "human subjects" and "house subjects" digitally and materially coevolve together within its walls. Perhaps then, and only then, will the postanthropocentric, polymorphous potentials of these various digital beings be appreciated apart from our anthropomorphic fixations upon humans simply being digital.

References

1. For such views, see Robert W. Lucky, Silicon Dreams: Information, Man, and Machine (New York: St. Martin's, 1989), 1-35. Also see Alvin and Heidi Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1980). (Retour au texte)

2. The best analysis of this practice can be found in Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87-104. (Retour au texte)

3. For a serious acceptance of this sort of digital being, see Michael J. Weiss, The Clustering of America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). Here "digital being" essentially becomes a type of "being normalization" as the statistical person is essentially reduced to a site for numerical command, control, and communication. (Retour au texte)

4. See Roderick P. Hart, Seducing America: How Television Charms the Modern Voter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion--Our Social Skim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and, Susan Herbst, Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). (Retour au texte)

5. Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1-21). (Retour au texte)

6. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 84-145. (Retour au texte)

7. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (London: Harvester Wheatsleaf, 1993), 1-6. (Retour au texte)

8. The cultural implications for deploying different rhetorics as well as rationalities in the representation of digital being are discussed in Michael Heim, Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of World Processing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); and, Gregory Ulmer, Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video (New York: Routledge, 1989). (Retour au texte)

9. Claus Emmeche, The Garden in the Machine: The Emerging Science of Artificial Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), 39-42, 114-117. (Retour au texte)

10. Hans Moravec, Mind Children (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). (Retour au texte)

11. See my "Political Economy of Colorization: Reel Rehab," Telos (Fall 1988), 127-138. (Retour au texte)

12. An excellent discussion of these digital beings can be found in Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 179-231. (Retour au texte)


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Réflexions : Théorie sociale de la communication

Pages

Numéro 6

Présentation

La nouvelle économie et l'ancienne
Pierre Blouin

Le bibliothécaire, l'arbre de connaissance et la médiathèque virtuelle (d'après un film de Éric Rohmer)
Pierre Blouin

A Political Economy of Librarianship?
William F. Birdsall

MegaMetaphorics : Re-Reading Globalization, Sustainability, and Virtualization as Rhetorics of World Politics
Timothy W. Luke

Si c'est un homme
Primo Levi

Comptes rendus

Yves Lavertu, Jean-Charles Harvey, Le combattant. Montréal, Boréal, 2000
Alain Lacombe

"Anti-Negroponte: Thinking about Cybernetic Subjectivity in Digital Being and Time,"
Timothy W. Luke

Présentation

A Political Economy of Librarianship ?

William F. Birdsall

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

References

MegaMetaphorics: Re-Reading Globalization, Sustainability, and Virtualization as Rhetorics of World Politics

O. An Overview

I. Metaphors and Politics

II. The Doxic Effects of Metaphor

III. "Globalization"

IV. "Sustainability"

V. "Virtualization"

VI. Summary: Doxosophies and Doxosophers in Politics

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Archives du blog

Pages

Numéro 6

Présentation

La nouvelle économie et l'ancienne Pierre Blouin

Le bibliothécaire, l'arbre de connaissance et la médiathèque virtuelle (d'après un film de Éric Rohmer) Pierre Blouin

A Political Economy of Librarianship? William F. Birdsall

MegaMetaphorics : Re-Reading Globalization, Sustainability, and Virtualization as Rhetorics of World Politics Timothy W. Luke

Si c'est un homme Primo Levi

Comptes rendus

Yves Lavertu, Jean-Charles Harvey, Le combattant. Montréal, Boréal, 2000 Alain Lacombe

"Anti-Negroponte: Thinking about Cybernetic Subjectivity in Digital Being and Time," Timothy W. Luke

Présentation

A Political Economy of Librarianship ?

William F. Birdsall

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

References

MegaMetaphorics: Re-Reading Globalization, Sustainability, and Virtualization as Rhetorics of World Politics

O. An Overview

I. Metaphors and Politics

II. The Doxic Effects of Metaphor

III. "Globalization"

IV. "Sustainability"

V. "Virtualization"

VI. Summary: Doxosophies and Doxosophers in Politics

Aucun commentaire:

Enregistrer un commentaire

Qui êtes-vous ?

Archives du blog

La nouvelle économie et l'ancienne
Pierre Blouin

Le bibliothécaire, l'arbre de connaissance et la médiathèque virtuelle (d'après un film de Éric Rohmer)
Pierre Blouin

A Political Economy of Librarianship?
William F. Birdsall

MegaMetaphorics : Re-Reading Globalization, Sustainability, and Virtualization as Rhetorics of World Politics
Timothy W. Luke

Si c'est un homme
Primo Levi

Yves Lavertu, Jean-Charles Harvey, Le combattant. Montréal, Boréal, 2000
Alain Lacombe

"Anti-Negroponte: Thinking about Cybernetic Subjectivity in Digital Being and Time,"
Timothy W. Luke