Intellectual Technologies Set
coordinated by
Jean-Max Noyer and Maryse Carmes
Volume 2
First published 2016 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd
27-37 St George’s Road
London SW19 4EU
UK
www.iste.co.uk
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030
USA
www.wiley.com
© ISTE Ltd 2016
The rights of Jean-Max Noyer to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950829
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-84821-910-6
Collective intelligences in the perspective of trans- and posthumanism
The modes of production of knowledge and intelligibility are undergoing a great transformation. Collective assemblages of thought and research are deeply affected by what we call the “digital folding of the world”, in concordance with the converging NBIC1 technologies. The very aims of these assemblages are controversial issues that question the performative becomings of science and technique in general. In particular, issues emerge that increasingly fuel debates about a subject that has several names: “transhumanism, posthumanism or speculative posthumanism”. Transhumanism comes as a Great Narrative, the master story of our future becomings as we enter an era defined by humanity making the world become increasingly artificial: the Anthropocene. Furthermore, transhumanism presents itself as a tangible utopia, the harbinger of a major anthropotechnical bifurcation. In this, the transhumanist subject inscribes itself precisely in the tradition of those who once attempted to imagine the “cerebralization” of the world.
In this book, we will therefore attempt to show how collective intelligences stand “right in the heart” of the coupling of, one the one hand, ontological horizons and, on the other hand, processes of biotechnical maturation.
New types of memory, renewal of analogical thought, powerful associationism, irresistible rise of algorithmics, distributed cognition, novel cartographic practices and relational encyclopedism are phenomena that manifest the transformation under way. What we call “nugget encyclopedism” is the open set made of “the community of works (texts, objects, hybrids, etc.) considered as an incompletion in process of production”. This is the great system of internal relations that constitute collective enunciation assemblages, the collective equipment of subjectivation that define the community, the vast texture of digital writings, objects and generalized algorithmics. Altogether, this is the huge Precambrian cauldron of Data, Metadata and Linked Data… a cauldron that enables its own folding. Producing new collective intelligences to be boiled in this cauldron and finding a new cauldron for the intelligences to come are the two issues we aim to address in this book, which is divided into three chapters. We first of all describe in Chapter 1 the most salient characteristics of the transformations currently taking place. These characteristics are mostly determined by the digital folding of the word, expressing the extension of the assemblages of intelligences and we detail how they differentiate and articulate from and with each other. In Chapter 2, an attempt has been made at summarizing trans- and posthumanist narratives, strictly abiding by their modes of enunciation. It also puts them in the perspective of the history of the cerebralization of the human species and sheds light on the symptoms these enunciations reveal. Lastly, in Chapter 3, we investigate the question of what encyclopedism is today underlining several issues it faces as well as some of its concrete modes of embodiment. The main writing apparatuses that affect the conditions of production and circulation of knowledge are thus analyzed.