2.1. A documentary theory of humanity

Theoretically, the document thus moves from a subordinate, secondary role to a major, essential role. This also involves considering it in a broader way than just professional anchoring, and placing it on more ambitious theoretical levels.

2.2. Documentality or social ontology

Maurizio Ferraris’ theory of documentality is in line with Jacques Derrida’s thinking. This theory questions language as a founding element of humanity in favor of a logic of inscription. An inscription that must be understood both as a trace that can be consulted, but also as pre-writing in our minds. This importance of the mark, of the trace is currently found in our environments with the development of documents that can be consulted online and in a mobile way. The least of our activities is accompanied by documentary parallels that attest to the reality of these facts or social objects:

Thus, the current explosion of writing brings us back to a characteristic of our species to which not enough attention is paid: the fact that we possess objects such as files, pens, notebooks, cell phones and computers. That in hotel rooms, next to the landline telephone – used only to talk with the reception – there is a notepad and a Bic or a pencil (objects of our greed – fortunately we can take them with us, unlike towels). That there are sophisticated recording devices in bars and restaurants that print receipts and bills in exchange for coins, bills and credit cards. That in our pockets we have an object called a wallet, designed to keep documents. All these devices serve to record, they potentiate and reify the memory. It has been said over and over again, in the last century, that our society is one of communication. Very well, but if this was literally the case, if communication was sufficient, the telephone should have become a microscopic auricular with a microphone in constant vocal connection with the world. Things, on the contrary, have turned out differently (...) after a race for miniaturization, cell phones have started to grow, they have potentiated their memories, enlarged their screens, improved their keyboards and have become typewriters and, above all, recording machines. They have become repositories of archives: libraries, discotheques, cinematheques and pinacotheques. (Ferraris 2014, chap. 3, para. 7, author’s translation)

The position of Ferraris joins that of Derrida with his work on the inscription and the conception of a kind of pre-inscribed grammar, what can be called a grammatization (Derrida 1979), if we also follow the work of Sylvain Auroux (Auroux 1995) and the more recent work of Stiegler (Stiegler 2005, 2008). Ferraris’ documentality comes into opposition with Searle’s theory of intentionality (Searle 1996). Without going into more detail on this famous quarrel, Ferraris’ aim is to question this quasi-magical passage whereby a collective intentionality confers a social status on a physical object.

According to Ferraris, intentionality rests on the condition of documentality, that is on documentary evidence.

Searle evokes an invisible ontology of social acts that Ferraris refutes. The Italian philosopher shows that this ontology is not at all invisible. According to him, it is not possible to consider that it rests simply on more-or-less negotiated conventions, but that it requires above all a documentary materiality. Documentality lies in the logic of an inscription, which can be that of the text and therefore of the writing. Ferraris also understands this writing as archi-writing in the Derridian tradition. It therefore presupposes pre-written forms, from genetic and epigenetic logics to bureaucratic manifestations such as forms.

According to Ferraris, traces are the first forms of documentality. They thus precede language. Obviously, traces are evolving to the point of considering that they now also exist in digital form (Galinon-Melenec 2011). These traces are forms of writing that require readings and interpretations. They are also based on a materiality that allows its “study”.

Documentality is thus a question of distinguishing the registration of the acts, without which nothing could finally be memorized and transmitted. The principle of documentality resides in the recording, which links it de facto with memory, and the instruments of memory. This logic of recording makes it possible not to oppose too strictly the systems of internal (anamnesis) and external (hypomnosis) memory, and on the contrary to consider them as complementary.

The registration of a social act such as marriage is manifested by the presence of documents attesting to the marriage. If both spouses can have written in their memory the date and the memory of their marriage, it is the official document which brings the proof of this act which will be required. This documentality can also be attested or supported by the presence of photos and videos taken during the wedding that can be transmitted and shared on the Web.

2.3. Documentality and memory

Ferraris thus makes documentality, the regime of memorization of intentions:

By ‘documentality’, I mean the theory, which I consider alternative, according to which the constitutive rule of social objects is rather: ‘Object = Inscribed Act’, that is to say that social objects are the result of social acts (such as they engage at least two people) characterized by the fact of being inscribed on a piece of paper, a computer file or even simply in people’s heads. I call this theory ‘documentality’ because it makes the construction of social reality depend on both external and internal documents. In this theory are implied, concerning collective intentionality, two postulates of different strength. The first is that collective intentionality is nothing more than the addition of individual intentionalities realized in documents, or in their predecessors in the case of societies without writing, for example rituals. The second is that individual intentionality, too, depends on a writing in the broad sense, which I call ‘archi-writing’ (...). (Ferraris 2014, chap. 4, para. 13, author’s translation)

This record of intent is based on evidence, and the document here constitutes that evidence. It is necessary, however, to clarify the contractual and intentional logic which is described here by Ferraris. The document represents a trusted third party who establishes proof of some kind of relationship between at least two persons. It presupposes forms of trust as to the veracity of the document. However, very often this veracity presupposes third parties who can attest to this veracity. Ideally, there should be “documentary” institutions in the sense of producers of certified documents. The challenge is then to combine documentality with its “documentarity”, in the sense of what makes a document, as evidence that is distinct from a forgery or a fictional element.

This is a key issue in the regimes of documentality, namely who owns the “keys” to the register, that is to say, who has authority over this documentary relationship, in particular to attest to its validity. I use the word “register” here deliberately, because it currently refers to the logic of blockchain, which constitutes an alternative model for new currencies such as Bitcoin. It allows different types of transactions to be carried out and uses a register² that attests to all the operations carried out. The register is, of course, the document that records events that have taken place previously, making it a recording instrument and therefore a mnemonic. Historically, this relationship to the regimes of documentality has been strongly linked to the development of writing and the manifestation of the exercise of power. Whether with clay tablets or with papyrus, documents frequently attest to data related to agricultural production that allow the establishment of taxes. Parish and civil status registers are not only proof of a birth, marriage or death, but they also testify to the exercise of power. This power resides in hierarchical systems that grant individuals the right to make registrations. In many cases, other documents attest to the right of these persons to do this work. This documentary power is also symbolized by those who keep the records. The role of archives is indeed to serve a preservation purpose that is also evidence of the preservation of a power that manifests itself in rights. The burning by peasants of the documents kept in the castle during the revolutionary period testifies to this desire to put an end to a power that also manifests itself through documents. Etymologically speaking, the archive comes from the Greek ἀρχεῖοv, which designates the residence of the higher magistrates, then deposit of official documents. Ἀρχεῖοv comes from ἄρχω, which means to order. This serves as a reminder that the archive is not a degraded document, but on the contrary a document whose value is potentially increased by its power of attestation.

Documentality then becomes the condition of governmentality according to Ferraris. Indeed, the regimes of documentality are based on the exercise of a power that is exercised through the conservation and memorization of the documents that are there to attest to the legitimacy of this power. Some states were thus qualified as paper regimes or “document regimes” such as the Kaghazi Raj, a state under the control of the British Empire and located in South Asia. This administrative culture remained active in some parts of India with the post-colonial License Raj period, where all economic activities were subject to authorization and planned through permits.

Documenting, collecting, organizing, preserving are typical actions of documentality regimes. Bertrand Müller evokes the concept of the “documentary regime” (Müller 2012) to show that there are rules and methods that are specific to a particular era and to the use of certain intellectual techniques. To this end, he considers that a change in the documentary regime is taking place in the human and social sciences with the Digital Humanities.

Before returning in more detail in the next chapter to the issues at stake in these documentary regimes, it is worth recalling this proximity between document control and the power associated with it.

2.4. Documentation and authority

If the logic that prevailed was that of regimes controlled by States for several centuries, the growth of documentary masses has allowed the development of new third parties of control, namely public administrations, but increasingly the bureaucracies of private organizations. So much so that the dualism of “knowing how to show” that Lisa Gitelman develops in the document’s know-show extends to many other organizations that cannot be dissociated from a desire for control:

Documents are integral to the ways people think as well as to the social order that they inhabit. Knowing-showing, in short, can never be disentangled from power – or, more properly, control. Documents belong to that ubiquitous subcategory of texts that embraces the subjects and instruments of bureaucracy or of systematic knowledge generally. (Gitelman 2014, p. 5)

The document is therefore accompanied by a desire for domination according to John Guillory (2004) who considers, however, that this is a prerogative that is developing during the modern period:

My point here is not that documents did not exist before the modern era, but that the dominion of the document is a feature of modernity. We can also see in this dominion a condition for the development of historical scholarship, for which all surviving writing must be understood first as document – as the carrier of information – before this information can be ascertained as factual. (Guillory 2004, p. 113)

It is therefore necessary to understand this domination of the document as also being the development of a scientific logic that will be able to rely more and more on materials that are precisely documents. Whether at the scientific or administrative level, what ultimately prevails is the document’s potential for exploitation. Lise Gitelman rightly reminds us of the need to move away from an overly literary vision that considers only a part of documents, when it is preferable to take into account all their handwritten, printed and digital forms.

The concept of documentary regimes requires an examination of the recipients of authority, including those who exercise it by delegation, such as public servants. On this point, Vilém Flusser’s description of the public servant appears interesting in more than one way:

You have to follow the praxis of the civil servant. He is sitting behind a table. He receives papers covered with symbols (letters and numbers). Other civil servants have provided him with them. He files them or throws them away. He fills out other papers with symbols. He passes these papers on to other officials. He is a receiver, transmitter and sender of symbols. His job is to manipulate symbols. His praxis is absorbed by the world of codes. (Flusser 2019, p. 58, author’s translation)

But Flusser goes further in the manipulative logic of the civil servant and finally symbolizes in this passage what will be described later in Chapter 5 between the indexing of knowledge and the indexing of existences. Just as laboratories, libraries or the entire computer center try to reduce the world to forms that can be manipulated in restricted spaces, so do documentary regimes proceed to the point where a form of inversion between the individual and the document occurs:

It so happens that for the issuing official, the vector of meaning has been inverted. Indeed, for him it is only the concrete person who signifies the passport, and it is this person who becomes the symbol. The person becomes the signifier, the number on the passport signifies it. For the civil servant, the concrete given is the passport. The person out there is an abstraction. Absorbed in his world of codes, the civil servant does not feel concerned by the person outside. His job is to change the world of codes. Such is the character of all functioning: inverting the vectors of meaning. The world of codes is the civil servant’s only reality. (Flusser 2019, p. 59, author’s translation)

This is where Flusser finally comes to reexamine the positioning of Homo documentator, who is a documentation professional according to Briet but who may just as well correspond to a civil servant governed by codes. By extension, it seems appropriate to us to extend the term “civil servant” here to all personnel carrying out bureaucratic activities that are strongly regulated by procedures that must be respected, which obviously includes private sector administrations and particularly actions carried out within the framework of platforms.

How can we analyze these professions in these logics that Flusser calls programming, as there are so many codes and writings already written within which one must act and apply rules?

To what extent is it possible to consider that these rules, processes or frameworks now concern all individuals who see their actions “documented” more and more regularly?

2.5. A hyperdocumentary era

The documentary influence and its trivialization can finally be seen through a small television anecdote. On October 21, 2015, Marty McFly and the “Doc” (the two heroes of the Back to the Future trilogy) appear on the Jimmy Kimmel Show, an American television show. The American presenter plays on the fact that it is precisely the date when the two heroes arrive in the future in the film released in 1985. The discussion then follows on what is new in 2015 compared to 1985. No flying cars, but the importance of the smartphone is demonstrated. Jimmy Kimmel then explains that the usefulness of the device is not that of a supercomputer that could be used by all scientists around the world, but an object that can send selfies to other people. He specifies that the smartphone is above all a device that allows us to “document all the important moments of our lives”. The word “document” is thus launched to explain our contemporary habits and what finally constitutes the particularity of our time. Documenting important key moments is certainly not new, but the fact that it can be done through dedicated and advanced technologies is presented here as an essential activity that occupies the daily lives of individuals. This anecdote fully reflects Ferraris’ demonstration on the iPad, which can now be applied to all smartphones:

The iPad is first and foremost a reading and writing machine, even if the keys are invisible when it’s turned off. This immediately raises an important point for our discourse: technological evolution has not led to the disappearance of writing and the triumph of orality, but, on the contrary, it is characterized by an explosion of writing. This is evidenced by the fact that, while cell phones once rivaled the race for miniaturization, they then began to expand again in order to have a screen and a keyboard. This in order to write and not to speak. The iPad best ratifies this shift: reading and writing are far more important than telephoning, so much so that we can resign ourselves to carrying around an object that doesn’t fit in our pocket and, more importantly, doesn’t even work as a phone – unless we want to use it laboriously for Skype conversations. An object, the possibility of which we couldn't even have imagined twenty years ago and, above all, the usefulness of which we wouldn’t have seen, seems to have become, at least for many of us, indispensable. Even those who don’t have an iPad in their bag have a cell phone in their pocket and use it to write much more than to talk (SMS traffic has surpassed call traffic). But if writing prevails, it’s also for a very simple but decisive reason: scripta manent. The iPad reveals very well the fact that – as we will see better – the communication society is, in depth, a recording society where everything must be able to leave a trace and be archived. (Ferraris 2014, chap. 1, para. 3, author’s translation)

This operation of documentation of our lives thus underlined in a particularly followed talk-show shows that the vocabulary of documentation has not disappeared. On the contrary, it is used in a fair way in a TV show, and this to characterize our present time. The verb “to document” is not necessarily the most used expression in English, as documentation as a concept has had difficulty spreading outside the French-speaking world.

The very clear marker is that of the movement of documentation to everyday activities. It is therefore not a school or extracurricular activity (documenting oneself) or a professional activity (that of documentalists), but increasingly an activity that is intrinsic to human practices.

This forces us to rethink somewhat the place of the document and thus to envisage a theory of the document that takes this evolution into account.

2.6. A document theory

The theories of hyperdocumentation and documentality make it possible to better consider current developments and to envisage a new general theory of documentality. Ferraris considers that any theory of documentality must more or less take into account seven main elements (Ferraris 2013, p. 266):

• 1) the different types of documents from the informal to the more formal;
• 2) the different physical and material aspects they take;
• 3) the different operations they may allow and receive (filling in, signing, countersigning, copying, authenticating, transmitting, invalidating and destroying);
• 4) the different actions that can be carried out thanks to the documents (concessions, loans, tax declarations, etc);
• 5) the different ways (happy and unhappy) in which these acts can be performed;
• 6) the institutional (organizational) systems to which these documents belong and the role played by the document within them;
• 7) the origin of the documents (difference between original and copy, falsification);

The elements mentioned by Ferraris are interesting insofar as they refer to fields that are already studied by Information and Communication Sciences. The work of the interdisciplinary collective RTP-Doc, alias Roger Pédauque (Pédauque 2006) has put forward three dominant elements that allowed the document to be considered as form, sign, and medium. In particular, the collective has emphasized the importance of the reading contract between the creator(s) of the document and those who were its receivers or interpreters.

However, it seems that it is necessary to study the new devices that enable the automated generation of documentary forms. It is necessary to move away from the literary vision that may have influenced the semiotic visions found in the Pédauque collective as well as in information and communication sciences. It is necessary to understand and study the evolution of man’s role in the new devices, all the more so since the reading contract between a human document creator and his human reader is no longer as obvious as it used to be. The concept of the reading contract poses many conceptual problems, particularly ICS, since from a concept derived from objects of study, it has sometimes ended up becoming a production tool, as Yves Jeanneret and Valérie Patrin-Leclère clearly show in relation to the media industries (Jeanneret and Patrin-Leclère 2004). Be that as it may, the reading contract deserves to be re-examined.

Indeed, the document may have undergone several transformations due to automated processes and the development of artificial intelligence. Whether in the act of creation or in the act of interpretation, it is not at all certain that humans retain any control in the process. How then to consider the creation of a document by a machine? Is it a strong document, a weak document, does it lose its documentary value if it is not created directly by a human? How to consider the action of the machine in automatic recording processes that mean even a telephone conversation can now be recorded? In the end, the digital transformation of our activities only increases the documentality that Ferraris observes. It also increases documentarity, that is, what makes a “document” when it is sometimes difficult to distinguish what has now become of documents in their connected, viral, easily modifiable and manipulable form, to the point of presenting monstrous aspects that require a study of their specificities within a documentary teratogenesis (Le Deuff 2007).

Documentarity is the documentary quality found in data and data clusters, but also in informational elements with documentary power, but whose veracity is never easy to assess, especially since metadata elements and repositories or even contexts are influenced by narrative strategies that are often fictional (Perret and Le Deuff 2019).

It could be considered that the increase in documentality necessarily leads to an increase in documentarity in a joint manner. However, this is not necessarily the case, since what can be documented does not necessarily contain the elements essential to the quality of information that Paul Otlet defended. As a result, there are legitimate bodies to assess the documentary qualities of the different types of information units that circulate.

The question of documentality then questions the current processes, particularly the algorithmic processes of information selection. Any documentary theory must therefore question the “mechanical” processes that are mobilized by playing on focal points that consist in observing not only the results of the processes that the documents can be, but also the entire device.