10.1. A continuous confrontation between ancient and modern?

Otlet thus warns in the conclusion of Monde of the risk of confrontation between two different visions:

World A is the one that stands still, if it does not retrograde, is willing to live by destroying, while risking being destroyed itself, a world that remains enclosed in past forms, ruled by yesterday’s conceptions. World B is the one that goes forward, reasons, builds, walks towards a mutation of old forms, towards new forms. (...) This world believes that there is no need to fear change, evolution, transformation or revolution. It professes that the idea is the ultimate power of the total society as well as of the isolated man and, in degraded degrees, of any being or even of the whole of nature. Therefore, World B proposes a closer correlation of acting organisms, a convergence towards a central point, the elaboration and execution of a World Plan. (Otlet 1935, p. 403, author’s translation)

In this confrontation between conservative and progressive, Otlet nevertheless seems to favor the idea of a teleology, of an end of history that should be achieved. However, his failures and the failures of pacifism cast doubt on the coexistence of the two projects. In many respects, one wonders if there is not a quantum logic in the Otletian description. There is the idea that somewhere, finally, the Mundaneum still exists and that it has even managed to triumph or is on the way to triumph.

It remains to be seen whether this hyperdocumentary success that Otlet foresaw and hoped for places us in a utopia or a dystopia. Unless it is necessary to consider that the hyperseparatist logics are in fact those that allow us to envisage myriads of heterotopias as so many ideal worlds, forming independent and autonomous monads?

Can we document everything to the point of being able to bring back memories or even recompose them in a kind of ideal world? Can one finally press a button to rebuild the world, or at least on a smaller scale, to rebuild one’s own world and reconstruct one’s own existence? Does hyperdocumentation lead to a major historiographical upheaval, that of rewriting one’s own history by moving from autobiographical logics to fictional wills that are fully assumed and sought-after? A total documentality that would gradually abandon its documentarity in order to abolish reality once and for all. A new storytelling that would not consist in “writing one’s story” even in a romanticized way, but in rewriting it completely.

Ulrich, the character of The Man without Qualities, seemed to take a particular position with regard to the fact that the man who would gain the possibility of exercising all powers and satisfying all his desires would undoubtedly mark a time of reflection. If this reinforces the idea that the most important thing is the journey rather than the destination, it also marks the fact that there remains an existential doubt that questions the individual about what it is really possible for him to do. Ulrich wonders in this context if the fact of mastering reality to this point would not then mark the necessity to abolish it, to abolish reality:

‘And what would you do,’ Diotima asked irritably, ‘if you could rule the world for a day?’

‘I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality.’

‘I’d love to know how you’d go about it.’

‘I don’t know either. I hardly know what I mean by it. We wildly overestimate the present, the sense of the present, the here and now; like you and me being here in this valley, as if we’d been put in a basket and the lid of the present had fallen on it. We make too much of it.’ (Musil 2011, p. 364)

Hyperdocumentation seems to be attached to a form of hubris that cannot be totally disconnected from a totalitarian vision in every sense of the word. Paul Otlet’s projects sometimes oscillate between a pragmatism that aims to respond to the documentary and political issues of his time, but which also manifest ambitious projections that also reflect a form of excess.

Otlet embodies both the torments of the giant Atlas, who is charged with carrying the world on his back, and the will to change and transform the world like a Prometheus who aims to give man the means to change his initial situation. His work is titanic in more than one way, but it is not unrealistic or rather unfeasible, except that international and economic circumstances are bound to hinder the success and continuity of the project. What is disproportionate is this desire to make science and knowledge, nations and globalism work together, so complex does it seem. But Otlet seems to be well aware that the spirit of the project can only succeed if it is implemented in a reticular way. Its success lies in the idea that it spreads in a viral way, like a contagion of ideas.

10.2. Between documents and monuments: Promethean vertigo

Hyperdocumentation certainly marks the passage between the document and the monument by symbolizing documentary growth to the point of excessiveness. Classically, the simplest passage is the one that makes the accumulation require a dedicated place, such as a library or rather a documentation center. The latter can then present an exceptional character also because of its architecture to fit into new urban logics which are those of the World City. Between the smallest informational unit and the greatest human physical achievement, there is a common spirit, that of the Mundaneum, which links documentality to monumentality.

If Otlet evokes in the fifth stage of documentation, the progressive fusion between document and instrument, it is no doubt tempting to consider that the sixth stage also marks another fusion, that of document and monument. The Mundaneum and the different declinations that Otlet perceived clearly mark this permanent passage between document and monument. It is a work of the mind that seeks to develop in forms that are as much material as immaterial.

Monumentality must therefore also be understood in the sense of memory, that is, as a transmission device over relatively long periods of time. In this respect, Otlet has somehow managed to realize it on his own scale, making the Mundaneum much more than an avant-garde library, but a monument in every sense of the word. The archives and documents of the Mundaneum are, moreover, a form of increase/exteriorization of himself, a kind of post-mortem transmission. A fusion of the documentality and monumentality of Paul Otlet.

In short, it is a Promethean dream that will accompany Otlet in his Mundanean project. At the Mundaneum-Palais Mondial, Otlet could admire the gigantic portrait of Prometheus painted by Jean Delville which adorned one of the rooms. This energetic Prometheus represents the Otletian energy that leads man towards divine powers. One need only think back to the description of the cosmoscope, a consequence of the hubris of the omniscient man, who has become comparable to God. Otlet even describes forms of higher states where there is no longer even a need for technical and documentary access, such as a progressive march towards higher stages of human intelligence, which is in fact more truly human. Indeed, Otlet envisages that the human race is only an intermediate race preceding a new, more evolved species, a superhuman, a hyperhuman of which we would be the ancestors:

The human species could be simply a transitional species. The highest achievements should enable us to transition to this other race. And our race would then be sacrificed, as in prehistoric times was the race of the ‘Precursors’, the Neanderthal men. Other mutations are possible, other metamorphoses. (Otlet 1935, p. 100, author’s translation)

While waiting for this coming linked to evolution or genetic programming and technical development, the optimistic vision of an Otlet who encourages us in a headlong rush nevertheless requires us to try to understand what is at stake in the medium term. The ethical question then appears to be essential in order to decide on the mutation issues that are in the process of taking place. Inevitably, what seems to be technically feasible will end up being so despite the obstacles that will be placed in its way.

One may then wonder how an individual would react to the potentialities of such devices of access to knowledge as instruments of power. History shows us that the evolution of our devices for observing and understanding the world is also accompanied by the evolution of surveillance devices. Panoptics are in a way a response to cosmoscopes. This possibility of knowing what is happening and what is being done obliges the person at the center of the device, the observer-transformer of the world, to think ethically, as he may be led to take problematic decisions. Once again, Flusser gave us an explanation:

It must be admitted that knowledge is one form among the forms of existence in the world. It is inseparable from the other forms of existence, otherwise it becomes inhuman. Objective, cold, pure knowledge, by isolating itself from the other forms of existence, becomes strictly criminal. If man is in the world, he is in the world by his experience, by his values and by his knowledge. He knows only what he has experience of and what he values. All knowledge therefore has an aesthetic dimension and a political dimension. All knowledge has aesthetic and ethical responsibilities. Any science that does not recognize this is an inhuman science. To recognize this, modern science must change. (Flusser 2019, p. 76, author’s translation)

10.3. Towards an ethical hyperdocumentation, the challenge of moderation

Hyperdocumentation marks the continuous increase of the potential for recording, storing, interpreting and consulting events and actions that are now documented or can potentially be documented. If users become aware of these phenomena as a result of an evolution in practices and by the warnings of the press and especially of fiction, it is probably advisable to be able to envisage “moderating” the powers of this hyperdocumentation.

Here we mean moderation in both directions, both moderation by limits to our will to know or will to truth, but also by the need for moderation that relies on moderators. These moderators can be human persons, but it is also possible to envisage devices that make it possible to regulate these different actions.

Beware, this is not a question of envisaging new prohibitions as strict rules that would lead to inquisitorial forms that are counterproductive in the long term. The strategies of circumvention have ceaselessly demonstrated the gap of trust between regulatory authorities and practices.

If we have become accustomed with the new regulations to better moderate the actions of personal data collection, the mechanisms for obtaining consent make it too often difficult to refuse these capture phenomena, which are often essential, even consubstantial to the applications that collect them.

Therefore, users do not need new T&Cs (Terms and Conditions), but rather a dashboard in which it would be possible to act with cursors to moderate in quantity and duration the data collected, to possibly refine the potential uses and to obtain the possibility of leaving with a set of personal data for consultation and personal storage. What’s more, a minimum level of interoperability of the devices appears to be necessary to be able to “migrate” from one application to another without risking losing everything, especially social interactions.

This is why it is desirable that social network-type systems should be based on interconnected and interoperable logics, which above all allow a decentralization of platforms, or even a distribution of instances that allow them to function, as in the case of the networks Diaspora or Mastodon, which are based on interaction modes equivalent to Twitter. This moderation implies forms of self-control and especially of its various projections within digital spaces.

This control passes through border zones that function as resistanceexistences that allow each individual to keep secret corners of themselves, impossible to index, that allow them to continue to have the right to dream without necessarily expressing it, and to be able to fantasize about alternative realities by means of the mind or some artifice.

10.4. Preserving the links, nexialism against hyperseparatism

Is it really necessary to go to San Junipero? To resituate the reference, this is an October 2016 episode of the British series Black Mirror that questions our current digital practices by taking them into potentially dystopian universes. This episode, one of the most stimulating of the series, poses many existential questions to the viewer. The city of San Junipero is a simulated reality in which the elderly can live, even after their death. There are several atmospheres in San Junipero and it is possible to relive another form of existence, especially by returning to an 80’s atmosphere while regaining an apparent youthfulness. It is then tempting for individuals to plunge back into this universe and “rebuild their lives a little”. The heroines of the episode experienced a very different life in their real existence and live a love story in this virtual universe which does not erase their former existence, but which allows them to live something new. The scenario questions the potentialities offered and in particular the prospect of living a post-mortem or even immortal existence, by being poured into the cloud.

In some ways, if we don’t truly change the world as Otlet wanted, this is the idea that each of us will be offered the possibility of living in the best of all possible worlds, breaking universalism into millions of different realities. Through a reverse effect, it will be possible to press a button, not to change the world, but to change one’s world. While the hyperdocumentation imagined by Otlet had to fight against the different forms of hyperseparatism, one wonders whether in the end hyperdocumentation might not become the ultimate condition of a hyperseparatism made up of fragmented existence-worlds.

In order to get out of this aporia, it probably remains for us to invent the appropriate political and decision-making gesture.

But moreso it remains for us to produce the synthetic forces and forms that Paul Otlet had called for in his encyclopedic attempts, and Neurath in his desire for unitary science. Among the opportune paths, one should probably follow the proposal of Robert Escarpit in his introductory lecture at the first congress of the French Society of Information and Communication Sciences in 1978 in Compiègne. He was then referring to a work of science fiction by A.E. Van Vogt, The Space Beagle:

In 1959, in his book The Space Beagle, the Canadian science fiction writer Van Vogt invented ‘nexialism’, which he defines as, “Nexialism is the science of joining in an orderly fashion the knowledge of one field of learning with that of other fields.” This science, he adds, “provides techniques for speeding up the processes of absorbing knowledge and of using effectively what has been learned.” Van Vogt probably did not know that he was describing here what was to become the ambition of the documentalist, and documentalists will no doubt be flattered to know that Van Vogt’s character, Elliott Grosvenor, unique and modest nexialist of the team of scientists on board the Space Beagle, an interstellar exploration spacecraft, after having been despised and even persecuted by his colleagues and fellow travelers, became the most influential man of the expedition. The lecture in which he introduces the crew to Nexialism, begins with the following words: ‘The problems which

Nexialism confronts are whole problems. Man has divided life and matter into separate compartments of knowledge and being. And, even though he sometimes uses words which indicate his awareness of that wholeness of nature, he continues to behave as if the one, changing universe has many separately functioning parts.’ To those who wonder what makes the unity of information and communication sciences, these words provide an important part of the answer. Van Vogt very intentionally named his new science Nexialism. Nexus, says my old Gaffiot, means linking, interlacing. Nexialism is the science of coherence, and this is a fine definition for our discipline. (Escarpit 1978, author’s translation)

It now remains for us to become nexialists and to lead the programming of this common science as a milieu of knowledge that knows how to deliver wisdom when the desire for power is felt. The fact remains that Grosvenor, the nexialist hero, does not hesitate to be cunning when it comes to convincing the entire crew, which forces him to make choices between ethics and higher goals.

But perhaps this is the only tenable position between the choice to be nothing, or to be Mundanean.