La Belle Inutile
Linking Art, Science and Technology
surrealists.org/Pierre Petiot
I had not initially considered appearing in this section dedicated to Some Surrealists Today.
And yet, while building the page devoted to Blue Feathers,
it seemed to me useful to publish here some texts that were contemporary of
the wonderful text
An Enactive Cognition Primer
written by Barrett John Erickson (Blue Feathers) in 1998,
in order to restore the atmosphere of intellectual boiling which animated us at the time.
Everything I wrote afterwards came out
of a slow deepening of these few initial texts, which themselves have not been published.
It would also be difficult to do so, given their density first of all,
and also given their size, both too large to appear on a web page
and too brief to constitute the content of a collection.
When a thought - mine or Barrett's - becomes a bit too dazzling, there is treachery in diluting it of course,
but there is just as much treachery in smothering in obscurity those few sparks from which it all came.
Those who know that poetry is not about poems, will sense that we were at the time
- and that we both remained, at least for instants - as close as possible
to a certain mental incandescence, a certain verticality.
To a certain dance of the mind which constitutes for one as for the other, I believe,
all that matters to us.
In order not to overload this web page, I only provide here
under the title Truth, Metaphor, Model
the beginning of a longer text, entitled
Metaphor and Computing
which also dates from 1998.
Je n'avais pas d'abord envisagé d'apparaître dans cette section dédiée à
Quelques Surréalistes Aujourd'hui.
Et puis, en réalisant la page consacrée à Blue Feathers,
il m'a semblé utile de publier ici
quelques textes contemporains du merveilleux texte
Une introduction à la cognition en acte
écrit par Barrett John Erickson en 1998,
afin de restituer l'atmosphère d'ébullition intellectuelle qui nous animait à l'époque.
Tout ce que j'ai pu écrire par la suite est sorti
d'un lent appronfondissement de ces quelques textes initiaux, qui eux-mêmes n'ont pas été publiés.
Il serait d'ailleurs difficile de le faire, compte tenu de leur densité d'abord,
et aussi de leur taille, à la fois trop importante pour figurer dans une page web
et trop brève pour constituer la matière d'un recueil.
Quand une pensée - la mienne ou celle de Barrett - se fait trop intense, il y a trahison à la diluer bien sûr,
mais il y a tout autant trahison à étouffer dans l'obscurité ces quelques étiencelles dont tout est venu.
Ceux qui savent que la poésie n'est pas une affaire de poèmes, sentiront que nous étions à l'époque
- et que nous sommes encore, au moins par instants, l'un et l'autre restés -
au plus près d'une certaine incandescence mentale, d'une certaine verticalité.
D'une certaine danse de l'esprit qui constitue pour l'un comme pour l'autre, je crois,
tout ce qui nous importe.
Afin de ne pas trop alourdir cette page web, je ne donne ici sous le titre Vérité, Métaphore, Modèle
que le début d'un texte nettement plus plus long, intitulé
Métaphore et Calcul
qui date lui aussi de 1998.
Truth, Metaphor, Model
"Nature happens. No one will add to it" - Paul Valéry
Only the truth of a metaphor may be defined. This is not to say that truth may be in any sense metaphoric. But simply that truth is a statement about the distance between metaphor and reality. Truth is an evaluation of the adequacy of a metaphor to reality. It would be absurd to think that truth is only that. Truth is that and nothing else. It cannot be otherwise. It has no other mode of existence. This because there is no evaluation of the adequacy of reality to reality, and besides, there is no need for it.
If this distance between metaphor and reality was ever to be suppressed, then only the "being there" would be left, perfectly adequate to itself, without any beyond, without any distance, a sort of absolute present, total chance or absolute necessity maybe, but chance or necessity, abstracted from this fundamental distance introduced by the image, the model, cannot be distinguished, and - so to say - are not even happening.
Engine
Zazie
Vérité, Métaphore, Modèle
"La nature advient, on n'y ajoutera pas" - Paul Valéry
Il n'y a de vérité que de métaphore. Ce n'est certes pas dire que la vérité soit métaphorique. Mais, il n'est de vérité que de cette distance de la métaphore au Réel. La vérité vient comme l'évaluation de l'adéquation de la métaphore au Réel. Il serait absurde de penser que la vérité n'est que cela. Non. Elle est cela, elle n'est rien d'autre. Elle ne saurait être autrement, elle n'a pas d'autre mode d'existence. Car il n'est point d'évaluation de l'adéquation de la réalité à elle-même et du reste, il n'en est pas besoin.
Qu'on annihile l'écart entre la métaphore et le Réel, et il n'est plus que l'être-là, l'être immédiat, parfaitement adéquat à lui même, sans au-delà, sans distance, un éternel présent, hasard total ou bien nécessité absolue, mais qui, hors du recul de l'image, du modèle, sont indiscernables et, pourrait-on dire, n'ont pas même lieu...
Here Comes the Sun
Zazie
Books
The books listed below condense themes of reflection that have kept me busy since the 1990s.
But none of them would have ever been written
if the 1990s had not also been those of the irruption of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
This is especially true as regards formal neural networks
which remain at the heart of what is commonly called Artificial Intelligence
but that it would be more accurate to call Artificial Perception.
In fact, the content of these books can be summarized along three axes:
First an attempt to update the theoretical corpus of Surrealism
- taken in the sense of the first manifesto -
based on recent scientific data, more particularly from biology and the sciences of the mind
as well as some recent ethnological works, including that of Bryan Hayden concerning the birth of inequality.
Second - and without my first becoming aware of it myself - some extensions of the concept of unconscious
than psychoanalytical techniques, due to their essentially therapeutic aims could not take into account.
And finally some thoughts on the nature of technology
according to the directions opened by the philosophers Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler.
All these books are bilingual English-French, are freely available in PDF format. Just click on the cover images.
Only one is in Arabic. I owe it to the kindness and translation work of my friend Mohsen Elbelasy
who took the trouble to produce this book from a selection of my texts.
Livres
Les livres listés ci-après condensent des thèmes de réflexion qui n'ont cessé de m'occuper depuis les années 1990.
Mais rien de tout cela n'aurait été écrit si les années 1990
n'avaient pas été aussi celles de l'irruption de l'Internet et du World Wide Web.
C'est particulièrement vrai de ce qui concerne les réseaux de neurones formels
qui restent au coeur de ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler L'intelligence Artificielle
mais qu'il serait plus exact d'appeler La Perception Artificielle.
En fait, on peut résumer le contenu de ces livres selon trois axes :
D'une part une tentative de mise à jour du corpus théorique du Surréalisme
- pris au sens du premier manifeste -
à partir de données scientifiques récentes, issues plus particulièrement de la biologie et des sciences de l'esprit
ainsi que de quelques travaux récents d'ethnologie, dont celui de Bryan Hayden concernant la naissance de l'inégalité
D'autre part, et sans que j'en ai moi-même d'abord pris conscience, quelques extensions du concept d'inconscient
que les techniques psychanalytiques du fait de ancienneté et de leurs visées essentiellement thérapeutiques
n'avaient pas été en messure de prendre en compte.
Et enfin quelques réflexions sur la nature de la technique,
selon les directions ouvertes par les philosophes Gilbert Simondon et Bernard Stiegler.
Tous ces livres sont bilingues Anglais-Français, sont accessibles gratuitement au format PDF.
Il suffit de cliquer sur les images de couverture.
Un seul est en Arabe. Je le dois à la gentillesse et au travail de traduction de mon ami Mohsen Elbelasy
qui a pris la peine de réaliser ce livre à partir d'une sélection de mes textes.
Live at the Height of Images - Vivre à Hauteur des Images
We do not perceive the world, but, most of the time, the representations that our brain elaborates.
In What is Life (1944), Erwin Schrödinger notes that,
only when our representations and our perceptions (at first unconscious) diverge,
is our attention awaken by this incoherence, and tries to resolve it.
The sciences of the mind allowed to validate this scheme.
The pre-eminence of representations over perceptions is heavily reinforced by the mechanisms of exchange
which imply the agreement of the parties on the equivalence of the objects exchanged.
This is only possible if the parties agree on blinding themselves as to the nature of these objects,
on reducing them to the status of conventions required for the exchange,
and on abstracting them from the relations and processes, in which they are however really intricated
with the rest of the world. This reduction of things – and beyond, of the world itself –
to the fictional role they play in exchange is not without ecological consequences.
Art and poetry, on the contrary, emphasize perception, attempting to capture forms in their emergence
and fluidity before they fossilize into representations.
Ordinary Possessions - Possessions Ordinaires
Since the end of Upper Paleolithic, the things by which we live, of which we believe ourselves masters, whether technical objects (furniture, tools, machines) or intellectual objects (images, ideas, methods), transform our minds in return and creep into our behaviors, our actions, and even into our sex lives. The ghosts of our things, which permanently haunt us, almost always unconsciously, have shaped our societies and our visions.
Recovering poetry, and the taste for life with it, first of all requires to accept our native symbiosis with our things, but as a symbiosis henceforth, thought, conscious, and lived. It also means to (re-)build free forms of collective work. The ecological crisis can help us ...
Primitive Accumulation of the Imaginary - Accumulation Primitive de l'Imaginaire
Although unquestionably much more developed in our species than in others,
aesthetic emotion is not the prerogative of humans, as many bird species spectacularly show.
The aesthetic passion, the passion for forms, is therefore rooted in biological evolution.
Only an interest of an aesthetic nature can therefore explain the establishment of networks
for the circulation of perfectly useless objects over distances of several thousand kilometres,
and this between Paleolithic societies living in complete economic self-sufficiency.
The end of the Upper Paleolithic saw the slow emergence of inequalities
within initially firmly egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies
and the systematic use of aesthetic emotions by the powerful and the religious.
A general historical movement where from pyramids to cathedrals, from cairns to palaces,
the powerful try to survive their deaths by systematically putting art at the service of their prestige.
To live free is therefore to escape from prestige.
To live at the height of images like artists and poets
and not subject to their power and the prestige games they feed.
Another Exploration of the Unconscious- Une Autre Exploration de l'Inconscient
Surrealism & Mathematics The last pages of the Premier Manifeste du Surréalisme (1924) consider the real functioning of human thought in its unity. The living sources of scientific thought appear in these pages as having the same origin as those of all other creative thought.
Chapter 3 entitled L'invention Mathématique of Henri Poincaré's book Science et Méthode in no way contradicts this view, but on the contrary anticipates it, since it is a lecture delivered by Poincaré in 1908, which emphasized the central role of the unconscious and analogy in mathematical creation. More than one century later, Alexandre Grothendieck's autobiography highlights the role of dreams in his own invention process and reinforces Poincaré's reflections. These two immense mathematicians hence contradict the rationalist ideology according to which "rationalist thought" is in itself creative.
Miscellanea - Miscellanées
This book is a collection of texts published here and there on the web or unpublished, written randomly from daily conversations. However, the thought does not disperse there and the reader will find again the main themes developed in previous books, but approached here from different angles. The objective remains, here as elsewhere, to open Surrealism on issues of the current era by proposing, for example, a genealogy of Representation. One will also find some corrections of ordinary journalistic vulgarities about "Artificial Intelligence" and "Algorithms", to which an educated, but not very inquisitive public surprisingly seems to give credit.
Other discoveries in the subconscious
يقدم هذا الكتاب نظرة عامة باللغة العربية على أهم الموضوعات التي تم تطويرها في سلسلة من 5 كتب ثنائية اللغة (الإنجليزية والفرنسية) والتي تم نشرها سابقًا بواسطة La Belle Inutile Editions. حيث يتناول الظهور البطيء ، أثناء التطور البيولوجي ، لهاتين الخاصيتين ا لأساسيتين للحياة : الخيال من ناحية والتمثيل الحسي من ناحية أخرى ، ويستكشف الدور الذي ربما لعبته هاتان السمتان المؤسستان للفن والعواطف الجمالية منذ التطور البطيء للمجتمعات غير المتكافئة منذ العصر الحجري القديم / الأعلى. بالإضافة إلى ذلك ، في فصلين آخرين ، هناك محاولة لتوسيع المفهوم الضيق للغاية للاوعي الذي طوره فرويد منذ أكثر من قرن مضى ، من خلال توسيع مجال الملاحظات ليشمل مجالين آخرين: اللاوعي الإيمائي (الذاكرة الإجرائية اللاواعية) و اللاوعي الإبداعي لعلماء الرياضيات. وأخيرًا ، هناك ثلاثة فصول أخرى ، تقترح بعض المهام التاريخية التي يمكن أن تقدمها السريالية في القرن الحادي والعشرين إذا كانت على استعداد لمراعاة المجالات الجديدة للتجربة والعمل والتي وفرها التطور الأخير للعلوم والتقنيات من ناحية ، و الأزمة البيئية الحالية المفروضة على الجميع من ناحية أخرى.
Bibliography
This bibliography is in French. It is meant to be taken globally,
it does not specify for each of my books which books by other authors I used to write this book.
It wouldn't make any sense. The idea is just to show that what I happened to write does not fall from the sky
but on the contrary is connected to the thoughts of some notable authors.
It seemed important to me to indicate which ones.
As I am French, I mainly read books in French.
When there is an equivalent or similar book in English, I specify it.
Whenever there is a Wikipedia record for an author, I have included a link to that record.
Bibliographie
Cette bibliographie est à prendre de manière globale, elle ne précise pas pour chacun de mes livres
quels livres d'autres auteurs j'ai utilisés pour écrire ce livre.
Ca n'aurait aucun sens. L'idée est juste de montrer que ce que j'ai pu écrire ne tombe pas du ciel
mais est au contraire lié à la pensée de quelques auteurs notables.
Il m'a paru important d'indiquer lesquels.
Comme je suis français, je lis essentiellement des livres en Français.
Lorsqu'il existe un livre équivalent ou proche en Anglais, je le précise.
Chaque fois qu'il existe une notice Wikipedia pour un auteur, j'ai introduit un lien vers cette notice.