Notes – Louis-Olivier Brassard’s JournalIdeas, notes, reactions from a young digital craftsman & thinker.Hugo -- gohugo.ioLouis-Olivier BrassardLouis-Olivier BrassardCC02024-03-24T02:38:57+00:00Post Zero: Why This Journal?2020-02-11T12:00:00+00:002020-02-11T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/000<p>I needed to write my ideas somewhere—but where?</p>
<p>Our personal, community and professional lives transit through a handful of entities in power.
These oligarchs have deceived us by creating the <mark>biggest sticky fly trap in human history—and yet, we continue to suck the honey</mark>.</p>
<p>This journal is a necessary reaction to the massive concentration of technical power—a power which has become nearly total.</p>
<p>It is a revolutionary <em>arrière-garde</em> publishing space aiming at addressing contemporary problems with minimal technology; it stands against technological solutionism and the (so-called) innovation repeatedly brandished by today’s charlatans.</p>
<p>This is not a reactionary blog; it does not mean to say: “things used to be better”; on the contrary, it embrasses new technical and intellectual advancements, however with an authentically critical and durable mindset, postulating a necessary return to simplicity.</p>
<p>This journal is my own—a truly personal space, a sandbox allowing me to express myself freely and in phase with the ideas I value most.</p>
<p>It has been on my mind for quite some time, and now here it is.
I have no doubt that it will live a long life and, just like me, evolve over time.</p>Text as the Chief Miracle of Humanity2020-02-12T12:00:00+00:002020-02-12T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/001<p>In <em>The Cristal Gobelet, or Printing Should Be Invisible</em> (1930), Beatrice Warde defends invisibility as the supreme quality of typography, as a means of clearly conveying thought through text.
Warde satates the anthropologically fundamental importance of language:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Talking, broadcasting, writing, and printing are all quite literally forms of <mark>thought transference</mark>, and it is the ability and eagerness to transfer and receive the contents of the mind that is almost alone responsible for human civilization.</p>
<p>(Warde, 1930)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Even though such “transference” occurrs through different mediums, it is with no surprise the <em>textual</em> (and <em>printed</em>) form which interests the most the typographer:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is sheer magic that I should be able to hold a one-sided conversation by means of black marks on paper with an unknown person half-way across the world.</p>
<p>(Warde, 1930)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I share an equal enthousiasm for the written word.</p>The Deutscher Werkbund: Good Design Before We Knew It2020-02-13T12:00:00+00:002020-02-13T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/002<p>The Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907, had a truly innovative vision for the “arts and crafts” and architecture (the term “design” was not yet common).</p>
<p>In a 1987 text published in <em>Design, Form and Chaos</em>, the famous designer Paul Rand reminds us of the motivations of the organization:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In 1907 the German Werkbund was formed, an organization whose purpose it was to forge the links between designer and manufacturer.
It was intended to make the public aware of the folly of snobbery and to underscore the significance of the “old ideals of simplicity, purity, and quality.”
Its aims were also to make producers aware of “a new sense of cultural responsibility, based on the recognition that men are molded by the objects that surround them.”</p>
<p>(Rand, <em>Good Design Is Goodwill</em>, 1987)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Over a century later, I could not find better words for today’s industry.</p>Expression Over Style2020-02-15T12:00:00+00:002020-02-15T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/003<p>In their 1988 essay <em>Typograhpy as Discourse</em>, Katherine McCoy and David Frej propose, following the reactions of graphic designers from schools in America and Europe, the coming of a “new typography” based no longer on the refinement of form, but on <strong>expression</strong>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The look and structure of the letter is underplayed and verbal signification, interacting with imagery and symbols, is instead relied upon.
The best new work is often aformal and sometimes decidedly anti-formal […].
Reacting to the technical perfection of mainstream graphic design, refinement and mastery are frequently rejected in favor of the directness of unmannered, hand-drawn or vernacular forms—after all, technical expertise is hardly a revelation anymore.
<mark>These designers value expression over style</mark></p>
<p>(McCoy and Frej, 1988)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The conclusion, which focuses on <strong>semantics</strong>, has more meaning today than ever before:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The focus now is on expression through semantic content, utilizing the intellectual software of visual language as well as the structural hardware and graphic grammar of Modernism. It is an interactive process that—as art always anticipates social evolution—heralds our <mark>emerging information economy</mark>, in which meanings are as important as materials.</p>
<p>(McCoy & Frej, 1998)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This text, written before the invention of the web, deserves to be reread in a society shaped by information architecture.</p>El Lissiztky’s Book2020-02-16T12:00:00+00:002020-02-16T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/004<p>El Lissitsky, one of the most active members of Russian Constructivism in the early 20th century, favoured a unifying vision between art and technique:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The so-called technical aspect is, however, inseparable from the so-called artistic aspect</p>
<p>(El Lissitzky, <em>Our Book</em>, 1926)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The fundamental relationship between form and content, between action and thought, is not new to «plastic» or visual artists, who work very closely with their respective media—oil and canvas for the painter, stone and metal for the sculptor, film and acid for the analog photographer, or even the computer program (script) for digital artists.</p>
<p>The <em>literati</em>—and more generally the “intellectuals”—who work mainly with <strong>text</strong>, do not seem worried by the material implications of the written word, in a <a href="http://www.anthonymasure.com/articles/2018-11-defaut-esthetique">logocentric perspective</a> (cf. Derrida) which depreciates <em>form</em> in favour of <em>idea</em>.</p>
<p>El Lissitzky notes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[…] our artists obtain the technical facilities for printing</p>
<p>(El Lissitsky, 1926)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>True—but what’s the issue?</p>
<p>Writing a <em>manuscript</em>—on a typewriter or through a text processor, such as Microsoft Word— is structurally heterogeneous to a <em>finished book</em>—such as a printed copy sold in a book store or a digital version consumed through Amazon’s Kindle.
Alone, a manuscript is worth nothing; it is not publishable; and if it is not written in a functional, decipherable, interoperable form, <mark>it does not deserve to be called a “text” editorially speaking</mark>.</p>
<p>It has become widely accepted that “intellectuals” subcontract the realization of their thought by the “little hands” of graphic designers and editors.</p>
<p>Form is a <em>sine qua non</em> condition of thought; it represents its conditions of possibility; without technique, it is not only the <em>inscription</em> of thought that disappears, but its <em>existence</em> altogether.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><mark>The private property aspect of creativity must be destroyed.</mark>
<mark>All are creators and there is no reason of any sort for this division into artist and nonartist.</mark></p>
<p>(El Lissitzky, <em>Suprematism in World Reconstruction</em>, 1920)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The dualistic debate has been raging for centuries—or even millennia, since the works of Plato and Aristotle.</p>
<p>It is time, more than ever, that we cease devaluating materialism and that we finally assume its fundamental unity with thought.</p>Air Machines2020-02-17T12:00:00+00:002020-02-17T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/005<p>When does technology translate into real social change?
Pleading against pure technophilia, El Lissitzky writes in 1926:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is shortsighted to think that the machine alone, that is to say, the supplanting of manual processes by mechanical ones
In the first place <mark>it is the consumer who determines the change by his requirements</mark>; I refer to the stratum of society that furnishes the “commission.”
Today it is not a narrow circle, a thin upper layer, but “All,” the masses.</p>
<p>(El Lissitzky, <em>Our Book</em>, 1926)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>His remark reminds us of the consumer’s central power in a society economically oriented towards the production of material goods, where “dematerialization” is just a mere extension.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The idea that moves the masses today is called “materialism,” <mark>but what precisely characterizes the present time is dematerialization</mark>.
[…] Then comes further growth of the communications network and increase in the volume of communications; then radio eases the burden.
The amount of material used is decreasing, we are dematerializing, cumbersome masses of material are being supplanted by released energies.
That is the sign of our time.</p>
<p>(El Lissitzky, <em>Our Book</em>, 1926)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What about ours?</p>On Center and Margins2020-02-20T12:00:00+00:002020-02-20T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/006<p>In a 1972 text, designers Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour suggest on the symbolism of architectural form.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But to gain insight from the commonplace is nothing new: <mark>Fine art often follows folk art</mark>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For instance:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Romantic architects of the eighteenth century discovered an existing and conventional rustic architecture.
Early Modern architects appropriated an existing and conventional industrial vocabulary without much adaptation.
Le Corbusier loved grain elevators and steamships; the Bauhaus looked like a factory; Mies [van der Rohe] refined the details of American steel factories for concrete buildings</p>
</blockquote>
<p>First observation: the “center”—from Bourdieu’s field theory—is not the primary source of new inventions; ideas emerge from the margins, or from the past.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><mark>Very little emerging from the underground fails to turn up in the mainstream.</mark>
Pornography, once the bane of puritan society, is used by the advertising industry for edgy allure.
Despite the occasional salvos by morality-in-media groups, all manner of publicly taboo sexuality appears in magazines and on billboards.
Popular tolerances have increased to a level where shock in any realm is hard to come by.</p>
<p>(Steven Heller, <em>The Underground Mainstream</em>, 2008)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Second observation: before becoming mainstream, an idea (which is not necessarily new) undergoes an <strong>underground phase</strong>, before being integrated into <strong>mainstream culture</strong>, where the condition of acceptation is the tolerance of the public, which in turn depends on a society’s current customs and the degree of exposition.</p>
<p><em>How to become mainstream?</em></p>
<p>Heller denotes a two-step process: art must make its own advertisement, but more importantly <strong>invent its own language</strong>.
It’s what dadaism, futurism or constructivism did in the past and what separated them from the mass culture of their time.</p>
<p>As we appear, in the post-postmodernist soup of extreme-contemporaneity, to have swung the pendulum in every possible direction, what meaning is there left to invent?</p>Erase the Author2020-02-21T12:00:00+00:002020-02-21T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/007<p>The “author” is still one of today’s greatest myths.
One of the most famous authors of Antiquity, Homer, may have never existed, and the <em>Iliad</em> would have been written by multiple people—all of them which remain unknown.</p>
<p>“Killed” by Barthes in 1968, the author seems (paradoxically) more alive than ever.
There is no such thing as a work without an author—mostly a single name: a writer, a filmmaker, a company leader.</p>
<p>Michael Rock raises the question: is a (graphic) designer an author?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>An examination of the designer-as-author could help us to rethink process, expand design methods, and elaborate our historical frame to incorporate all forms of graphic discourse.
But while theories of graphic authorship may change the way work is made, <mark>the primary concern of both the viewer and the critic is not who made it, but rather what it does and how it does it</mark>.</p>
<p>(Michael Rock, <em>The Designer as Author</em>, 1996)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>More than ever, today’s contemporary society is an extraordinarily heterogeneous mix of historical and technical efforts.</p>
<p>Is it not the time to abandon, once and for all, the mythical «author»—whose personal expression seems meaningless before today’s global issues—in favour of <strong>projects oriented towards common good</strong>, where the credits will forever remain incomplete?</p>A Refreshing Note to the Enthusiastic Student2020-02-22T12:00:00+00:002020-02-22T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/008<blockquote>
<p>A hail of words, like rain in April, can do no more than keep the air sharp and sweet and the ground springy underfoot; and that is the best a formal design education can hope to do—relevantly.</p>
<p>(Norman Potter, ”Design education: principles” in <em>What is a designer: objects. places. messages.</em>, 2002 [1969])</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Norman Potter insists on the importance of lengthy training, both by <strong>studying</strong> and <strong>practising</strong>.</p>
<p>The intellectual bubble is like wearing a pair of pink glasses with microscopic tunnel vision.
The enthusiasm for new ideas must be continuously maintained and renewed, but nevertheless measured and experienced.</p>Citizens Under Surveillance2020-02-24T12:00:00+00:002020-02-24T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/009<p>I enter a fantastic zero-waste cafe & grocery store in Québec City.
An intriguing library features many old philosophy books (Plato, Rousseau and Nietzsche, to name a few) as well as books on more generic topics, such as cooking and lifestyle.</p>
<p>One book cover, which looks deceptively dated, catches my attention: <a href="https://ecosociete.org/livres/citoyens-sous-surveillance"><em>Citoyens sous surveillance: la face cachée d’Internet</em></a> [<em>Virtuality Check: Power Relations and Alternative Strategies in the Information Society</em>].</p>
<p>From the french version of 2002:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>By monitoring and storing all cyberconsumer’s possible behaviours—personal information, navigation habits, areas of interest and preferences, reactions to given situations—marketing specialists can proceed to data explorations which lead to personal profiles or statistical sets.
<mark>This data can be used to categorize consumers or carry out personalized marketing, known as targeted diffusion.</mark></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I find the above remarkably accurate—written well before the creation of Facebook—and still incredibly relevant twenty years later.</p>Craft2020-02-25T12:00:00+00:002020-02-25T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/010<p>My studies at university are heavily, if not exclusively, based on theory.
Why not consider the <strong>pedagogical</strong>—or epistemological—value of <strong>craft</strong>, as it is done in design?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The knowledge gained through activities that can be described as tactical, everyday, or simply craft is powerful and important, and it must form the foundation of a designer’s education and work—<mark>it is how we create ideas</mark>; again, how we create culture.</p>
<p>(Lorraine Wild, <em>The Macramé of Resistance</em>, 1998)</p>
</blockquote>Theory2020-02-26T12:00:00+00:002020-02-26T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/011<p>In her foreword of <em>Graphic Design Theory: Readings From The Field</em>, Ellen Lupton notes the importance of taking a step back to reflect on work:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With so much to do, stopping to think about why we pursue these endeavors requires a momentary halt in the frenetic flight plan of professional development.
Design programs around the world have recognized <mark>the need for such critical reflection</mark>, and countless designers and students are hungry for it.</p>
<p>(Ellen Lupton, “Foreword: Why Theory?” in <em>Graphic Design Theory: Readings From The Field</em>, 2009)</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>“Why?’</em> when the professional already knows <em>“How?”</em></p>
<p>Theory is a guide, an invitation to consider the world differently.</p>
<p>Theory is also a “critical” necessity as design is no longer a technical question (<em>Can we do it?</em>), but rather an <strong>ethical</strong> one (<em>Should we do it?</em>).</p>Fighting Complexity2020-02-27T12:00:00+00:002020-02-27T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/012<p>Kenya Hara urges designers to stop keeping up with technological innovation and instead strive for new experiences of the world around us.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[…] technology ought to evolve more slowly and steadily.
It would be best if it took the time to mature, through trial and error.
We are so excessively and frantically competitive that we have repeatedly planted unsteady systems in unsteady ground, which have evolved into a variety of trunk systems that are weak and liable to fail, but have been left to develop anyway.</p>
<p>(Kenya Hara, <em>Designing Design</em>, 2007)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>From the above derives the following corrolary:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>People have wrapped themselves in this unhealthy technological environment and are accumulating more stress every day.
Technology continues to advance and has multiplied beyond the amount knowable by a single individual; its entirety can be neither grasped nor seen, and it’s so vast its edges fade from view.</p>
<p>(Kenya Hara, <em>Designing Design</em>, 2007)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Therefore, returning to simplicity would offer at least two advantages, one for the <strong>audience</strong> (struggling to keep its head above the water in a saturated information economy) and one for the <strong>designer</strong> (who has lost control of systems which can fail at any moment).</p>A Single Culture2020-02-28T12:00:00+00:002020-02-28T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/013<p>Questioning cultural exclusivity, sisters Ellen and Julia Lupton cite philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who proposes the idea of a new “cosmopolitanism”, an actual “world citizenship”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The world […] is made up of individuals, not of cultures. Individuals belong to a shared humanity and a global civilization as well as to a local community.
A cosmopolitan place such as New York or Paris or Kumasi draws its energy from a mix of persons, inextricably connected with a larger world, who have the right to participate in a world discourse.</p>
<p>(Ellen and Julia Lupton, <em>Univers Strikes Back</em>, 2007)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>With shared protocols, one can communicate in any language in the world, send a photo, or watch the World Cup in Kuala Lumpur, Rio de Janeiro or Singapour, sitting in an IKEA chair and drinking coffee out of a local restaurant or eating poutine at McDonald’s.</p>
<p>There is only <mark>one global culture</mark> (with endless boundaries); why waste time drawing the lines of cosmopolitism?</p>Feasible Utopias2020-03-02T12:00:00+00:002020-03-02T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/014<p>Who said utopias are never realized?</p>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/014/friedman-couverture.jpg"
alt="Cover."
title="Yona Friedman, *Manuals, vol. 1*"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Yona Friedman, <em>Manuals, vol. 1</em></strong>
<p>
Cover.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>Advocating for a simple and pragmatic approach, Yona Friedman’s “manuals” are an invitation to consider the most fundamental questions on life in society.</p>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/014/couverture-complete.jpg"
alt="Complete cover."
title="Yona Friedman, *Manuals*"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Yona Friedman, <em>Manuals</em></strong>
<p>
Complete cover.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>These manuals are tools.
They are published to make utopias feasible: the non-paternalistic society, the spatial city, the urban village, survival architecture, mobile architecture…
(these utopias are often realized by themselves).
[…]
These manuels do not offer any solution.
<mark>The solution must be invented by the reader, they awaken the capacity to think and act oneself.</mark>
If one stops delegating one’s power to the architect, to the institution, to the expert, if one dares use his natural skills (thought, language, drawing…), man can develop a non-paternalistic society, a society where those who decide are those who live with the consequences of their decisions.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/014/sujets.jpg"
alt="Subjects."
title="Yona Friedman, *Manuals, vol. 1*"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Yona Friedman, <em>Manuals, vol. 1</em></strong>
<p>
Subjects.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>Displaying his ideas in the form of short sentences and drawings (”bandes dessinées”), Friedman wanted to communicate in the simplest and most accessible way possible.
His goal: find a commonplace which would allow both the specialist and the man on the street to understand each other.</p>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/014/page-pauvre.jpg"
alt="Selling gadgets to poor people."
title="Yona Friedman, *Manuals, vol. 1*"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Yona Friedman, <em>Manuals, vol. 1</em></strong>
<p>
Selling gadgets to poor people.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>Caring about broadcasting ideas and educating people, Friedman choses the most affordable means.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Then comes the question of diffusing these manuals.
These drawings could also be in audiovisual format, but that would require expensive equipment.
There is another medium: wall posters.
<mark>It is the cheapest technique.</mark></p>
</blockquote>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/014/pauvrete.jpg"
alt="Selling gadgets to poor people."
title="Yona Friedman, *Manuals, vol. 1*"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Yona Friedman, <em>Manuals, vol. 1</em></strong>
<p>
Selling gadgets to poor people.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/014/page-the-city-belongs-to-the-child.jpg"
alt="The city also belongs to the child."
title="Yona Friedman, *Manuals, vol. 1*"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Yona Friedman, <em>Manuals, vol. 1</em></strong>
<p>
The city also belongs to the child.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/014/the-city-belongs-to-the-child.jpg"
alt="The city also belongs to the child."
title="Yona Friedman, *Manuals, vol. 1*"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Yona Friedman, <em>Manuals, vol. 1</em></strong>
<p>
The city also belongs to the child.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Children are born utopians</p>
<p>it is strange to discover</p>
<p>that poor neighbourhoods in poor countries</p>
<p>are often nearer to children’s utopia</p>
<p>than affluent neighbourhoods in rich countries.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/014/page-children-utopians.jpg"
alt="Children are born utopians."
title="Yona Friedman, *Manuals, vol. 1*"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Yona Friedman, <em>Manuals, vol. 1</em></strong>
<p>
Children are born utopians.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/014/children-are-born-utopians.jpg"
alt="Children are born utopians."
title="Yona Friedman, *Manuals, vol. 1*"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Yona Friedman, <em>Manuals, vol. 1</em></strong>
<p>
Children are born utopians.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Children’s utopia is not an expensive one, but it is incompatible with war.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/014/play-and-work.jpg"
alt="Play and Work."
title="Yona Friedman, *Manuals, vol. 1*"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Yona Friedman, <em>Manuals, vol. 1</em></strong>
<p>
Play and Work.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/014/planete.jpg"
alt="Earth, precious ship."
title="Yona Friedman, *Manuals, vol. 1*"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Yona Friedman, <em>Manuals, vol. 1</em></strong>
<p>
Earth, precious ship.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/014/bateau.jpg"
alt="Our boat."
title="Yona Friedman, *Manuals, vol. 1*"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Yona Friedman, <em>Manuals, vol. 1</em></strong>
<p>
Our boat.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>Welcome to the Internet2020-03-03T12:00:00+00:002020-03-03T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/015<p>In <a href="https://www.tamere.org/nos-livres/manuel-de-la-vie-sauvage/"><em>Manuel de la vie sauvage</em></a> («Guide to living in the wild»), novel written by Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard and published in 2018 from Ta Mère, the cofounder of the startup (Laurent), discusses with his company lawyer (Arnaud) on ways to avoid being sued.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>– What people do with the app, it’s not your fault.
The worst-case scenario might be we run over the fine print in the <em>end-user license agreement</em> […].
It will show your good will, and it won’t affect the way people use the app.</p>
<p>– So we’re going to dump responsibility on the user’s side? Laurent asks.</p>
<p>– If the users accept the license, what’s the problem? Arnaud replies.</p>
<p>– That would mean we are basing our service on the fact that the users don’t even know to what they’re agreeing to, Laurent says.</p>
<p>– Welcome to the Internet, Arnaud replies with the broadest of smiles.</p>
</blockquote>No More Starchitects2020-03-04T12:00:00+00:002020-03-04T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/016<p>The history of architecture is mainly the one of masculine figures erected as “heroes,” from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier to Frank Lloyd Wright.
It is characterized by the many idiosyncrasies of self-expression and so-called purity—<mark>a form of art which is “existentially incompatible with society”</mark>. <sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
<p>Architecture historian Wouter Vanstiphout comments that architecture must scale back down to human life:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To restore architecture and planning to a position where it can have a real positive impact on society may even demand destroying the mythology of the architect as visionary. <sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Architecture, being the most prominent and invasive form of culture, is also a means of expressing absolute power, as design critic and historian Deyan Sudjic points out:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In its scale and its complications, architecture is by far the biggest and most overwhelming of all cultural forms.
It literally determines the way that we see the world, and how we interact which each other.
[…] And for a certain kind of architect it offers the possibility of control over people. <sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Architecture has too much gravity to be abandoned in the hands of a single ego.</p>
<hr>
<p>Fast-forward March 3, 2020.
The prestigious Pritzker prize is awarded for the first time to <a href="https://www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/2020">two female architects</a>, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, whose work is a remarkable—yet silent—example of monumental modesty:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We think about a heroic space and at the same time think about how a human being feels in our space.
We think about our agenda as being a humanist agenda, and that’s at the forefront.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/016/yvonne-farrell-shelley-mcnamara.jpg"
alt="Photo courtesy Alice Clancy and the Pritzker Architecture Prize."
title="Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara</strong>
<p>
Photo courtesy Alice Clancy and the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>More than just <em>humane</em>, their work emphasizes on harmony with the environment:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We see the Earth as client. This brings with it long-lasting responsibilities.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Even though the two women explicitly do not strive for public recognition, their ideas nevertheless deserve to be put under the spotlight—at least as an example for us to follow.</p>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/016/urban-institute.jpg"
alt="Project constructed in 2002 by Grafton Architects. Photo courtesy of Ros Kavanagh and the Pritzker Architecture Prize."
title="Urban Institute of Ireland"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Urban Institute of Ireland</strong>
<p>
Project constructed in 2002 by Grafton Architects. Photo courtesy of Ros Kavanagh and the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Ratti, Carlo, and Matthew Claudel. “The Promethean Architect: A Modern(Ist) Hero.” In <em>Open-Source Architecture</em>. New York, New York: Thames and Hudson, 2015. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>Australian Design Review. “Historian of the Present: Wouter Vanstiphout,” August 11, 2011. <a href="https://www.australiandesignreview.com/architecture/historian-of-the-present-wouter-vanstiphout/">https://www.australiandesignreview.com/architecture/historian-of-the-present-wouter-vanstiphout/</a>. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p>Sudjic, Deyan. <em>Edifice Complex: The Architecture of Power</em>. London: Penguin Books, 2011. <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Storytelling as a Necessity2020-03-07T12:00:00+00:002020-03-07T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/017<blockquote>
<p>Artists are professional storytellers. <sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This sentence crystallizes, in my opinion, the main idea of Quebecois filmmaker Hugo Latulippe.
Looking at global issues such as climate emergency or the abuses of neoliberalism, we <em>must</em> invent new worlds.</p>
<p>The role of the artist is not only to imagine these worlds, but to awaken citizens to the necessity of breaking free from the dominant paradigms, to care about our society, through <em>storytelling</em>.</p>
<p>By putting our world into narrative form, art becomes a substitute to the stories historically monopolized by religion, and today by large business owners through an endless number of <em>success stories</em>—such as the virulent <em>American dream</em>.</p>
<p>Artists are not indoor decorators or museum specimens; they engage us on the path of necessary change through the means of beauty, sacred and thought.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Art is a vast attempt of collective fabrication.
It is its main function and its most radical action.</p>
<p>(Véronique Côté, cited by Hugo Latulippe)</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>We must by all means create a world where we will live free of the capitalist system, which is the fruit of a fundamentally strange hegemonic culture.
It will be difficult.
It will first be done by creators.
Those who rig a world outside of the governing myth.
It will demand an indisputable talent to create, people trained for it.
If they unite with each other, they will start a great collective narrative.
It has already started.</p>
<p>(Catherine Dorion, cited by Hugo Latulippe)</p>
</blockquote>
<p><mark>The greatest force of art might be to enable us to think by ourselves</mark>, in an autonomous way, around common stories and through individual experiences.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Latulippe, Hugo. <em>Pour nous libérer les rivières : plaidoyer en faveur de l’art dans nos vies</em>. Documents 16. Montréal: Atelier 10, 2019. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Design as Open Knowledge2020-03-10T12:00:00+00:002020-03-10T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/018<blockquote>
<p>British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1936) shrewdly observed that it is easier to ship recipes than cakes and biscuits.
The simple statement is compelling, almost blindingly obvious—and yet it is not how the world’s industrial economy works.
Alastair Parvin contends that we are moving into a world where <mark>the recipes will become the most valuable thing on earth, and yet simultaneously they should be free</mark>.</p>
<p>[…]</p>
<p>Design can, in theory, be shared and distributed in the same way as recipes communicate food.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>By sharing, forking, and recursively modifying “recipes” through online collaboration, we may not only achieve better ideas, but also build a more sustainable, inclusive future—for all.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As Keynes noted, there is more value in the recipe than the cake.</p>
</blockquote>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Ratti, Carlo, et Matthew Claudel. « Open Source Gets Physical: How Digital Collaboration Technologies Became Tangible ». In <em>Open-Source Architecture</em>. New York, New York: Thames and Hudson, 2015. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>BUY THIS!2020-03-12T12:00:00+00:002020-03-12T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/019<blockquote>
<p>I am profoundly convinced that true fascism is what sociologists have too softly named consumer society.</p>
<p>(Pier Paolo Pasolini, cited by Hugo Latulippe)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Consumer economy has become the dominant regime for society’s salvation.
Such a pseudo-structural argument merely serves the purpose of justifying the individual gratification of the act of consumption (going to the shopping mall as a hobby, feeling empowered by wearing a particular brand, congratulating ourselves of buying a discount product).</p>
<p>Consuming is not only a means for individual relief; it is also a way of a useful citizen.</p>
<p>No manipulation has transcended so many borders.</p>
<p>In all societies, there are institutions fulfilling a sacred function (rites and practices around meaningful stories).</p>
<p>The act of faith is not (only) praying, it is (mostly) consuming.</p>
<p><mark>What gives meaning to life</mark>, if not consumption?</p>
<p>Can art replace consumption as a sacred function, by allowing us to dream collectively?</p>Anonymous Architecture2020-03-19T12:00:00+00:002020-03-19T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/020<p><figure class="Figure invertable">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/020/tour-invertable.jpg"
alt="Drawing, Sugar Cane Mill in the Buccaneer Plantation, St. Croix, Virgin Islands."
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title"></strong>
<p>
Drawing, Sugar Cane Mill in the Buccaneer Plantation, St. Croix, Virgin Islands.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>What can we learn from the anonymous buildings of vernacular architecture?
Which truths can be found in what Bernard Rudofsky called “architecture without architects?”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The architect of tomorrow should look at yesterday, “at the actual architectural evidence of the past.”
There he will find “inspiration and stimulus.”
The architecture of the future will have to rely upon a new understanding of technology – broader than the narrow focus on calculus and mechanics – and upon a study of settler buildings.
<mark>The latter are offering a “superb lesson in regionalism without romanticism, in functionality without mechanism, in structure without ugliness, in tradition without regression.”</mark></p>
<p>(Hilde Heynen, citing Sibyl Moholy-Nagy)<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>While modern architecture attempted to get as close as possible to the fundamentals of construction, <strong>vernacular architecture</strong> may hold not only the sincerest answer (of function and meaning), but also the essence of architecture.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But the value of vernacular architecture goes deeper… in addition to service and aesthetic appeal, the structure built by settlers in a new land can serve as visual means to come closer to an understanding of the causes of architecture.
They are in the actual meaning of the term primitive, meaning not simple but <em>original</em>.</p>
<p>(Sibyl Moholy-Nagy)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sibyl Moholy-Nagy is therefore suggesting an <strong>epistemology</strong> of architecture: to understand architecture, we must look away from the so-called modern architecture – cold and disconnected – in favour of the “primitive” one – anonymous, intuitive, spontaneous, rural and organic; the one that responds to true needs; the one that permits unmediated human expression; the one that leads to architectural efficiency.</p>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/020/photo-livre.jpg"
alt="Photo of the book Sibyl Moholy-Nagy: Architecture, Modernism and its Discontents."
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title"></strong>
<p>
Photo of the book Sibyl Moholy-Nagy: Architecture, Modernism and its Discontents.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Heynen, Hilde. <em>Sibyl Moholy-Nagy: Architecture, Modernism and Its Discontents</em>. Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Minimal2020-03-25T12:00:00+00:002020-03-25T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/021<blockquote>
<p>The Minimum <del>could be defined as the perfection an artifact achieves when it can no longer be improved by subtraction. This is the quality that an object has when every component, every detail, and every junction has been reduced or condensed to the essential. It</del> results from the omission of the inessential.</p>
<p>(John Pawson<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>)</p>
</blockquote>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Strikethrough by me. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Memes and Cybercondriacs2020-03-29T12:00:00+00:002020-03-29T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/022<p>Can a mere idea cause medical pathology?
At first, such question may appear excessively philosophical, but the phenomenon is <a href="https://annals.org/aim/article-abstract/713162/memes-infectious-agents-psychosomatic-illness">medically documented</a>.</p>
<p>Antonio Casilli suggests the term «cyberchondriacs» to describe individuals affected by such :</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Web also conveys epidemics of panic.
Rumours regarding the existence of fake diseases can sometimes spread across online forums.
This fuels legions of <mark>“cyberchondriacs”</mark> and, according to experts, would have a triggering effect on sicknesses with strong psychosomatic aspects.</p>
<p>(Antonio Casilli<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The virality of the Internet <strong>meme</strong> – a term coined by Richard Hawkins’ <em>The Selfish Gene</em> (1976), well before the Web was born – can therefore be understood in a completely literal sense, comparable to that of bacteria and micro-pathogens.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Casilli, Antonio. <em>Les liaisons numériques. Vers une nouvelle sociabilité ?</em> La couleur des idées. Paris: Seuil, 2010. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Today’s Intellectuals2020-04-10T12:00:00+00:002020-04-10T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/023<blockquote>
<p>Every generation has its philosopher — a writer or an artist who captures the imagination of a time. Sometimes these philosophers are recognized as such; often it takes generations before the connection is made real. But recognized or not, a time gets marked by the people who speak its ideals, whether in the whisper of a poem, or the blast of a political movement.</p>
<p>Our generation has a philosopher. He is not an artist, or a professional writer. <mark>He is a programmer.</mark></p>
<p>(<a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/lessig-fsfs-intro.en.html">Lawrence Lessig</a>)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I would say: he is both a programmer <em>and</em> a philosopher.</p>Intellecutals of the Future2020-04-13T12:00:00+00:002020-04-13T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/024<blockquote>
<p>I think that what designers will do in the future is to become the reference point for policy-makers, for anybody who wants to create a link between something that is highfalutin and hard to translate, and reality and people.
<mark>And I almost envisage them as becoming the intellectuals of the future.</mark></p>
<p>(Paola Antonelli)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“Almost.”</p>
<p>Antonelli’s statement may at first appear safe, merely hypothetical—but what comes next leaves no doubt about her vision about the place of designers in society:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I always find it really funny—the French, whenever they have to talk about the price of gas, or the cheese war with Italy, they go to a philosopher, right?
This is kind of hilarious, no?
Philosophers are the culture generators in France.
<mark>I want designers to be the culture generators pretty much all over the world!</mark></p>
<p>(Paola Antonelli)<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Transcript from an interview in the documentary by Gary Hustwit, <em>Objectified</em> (2009). Paola Antonelli is a Senior Curator of Architecture & Design, as well as Director of Research & Development at the MoMA. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>What Authority?2020-04-23T12:00:00+00:002020-04-23T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/025<p>Discussing the new forms of institution and authority, namely the literary one, in the digital era, <a href="http://blog.sens-public.org/marcellovitalirosati/la-fin-de-lautorite/">Marcello Vitali-Rosati</a> draws interest towards the <strong>structures</strong>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The question is about how the structures of the digital space are put in place – and by whom — and to try to understand the means by which they are at the base of the assertion of an authority.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Structure produces authority.</p>
<p>A simple illustration: between the walls made of concrete inside a secure prison, the authority is demonstrated by itself; there is no need for a human agent to keep a prisoner in place.</p>
<p><figure class="Figure invertable">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/025/prison-invertable.png"
alt="The bars of a prison cell clearly state the contours of an authority."
title="A prison cell"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">A prison cell</strong>
<p>
The bars of a prison cell clearly state the contours of an authority.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>In everyday life, structural power is expressed more subtly, if not with complete transparency.
Entrusting one’s daily itinerary, personal communications and shopping habits to one entity no longer seems like a sane idea when that same entity decides for one’s exposure to information and advertisement.
Is criticism even possible when the inner works of such a system is not even revealed?</p>
<p>But authority is not just a technical matter: it is also a question of symbolic trust.
Failing for a more credible authority, would one be enclined to challenge the reality suggested through the first page of a Google search or a personalized Facebook news feed?</p>
<p>Structure is an authority without a face.
We must learn to unmask it before it traps us for good.</p>
<p><figure class="Figure invertable">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/025/toile-g-invertable.png"
alt="A not-so-metaphor: who is weaving the web?"
title="Drawing of a web"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Drawing of a web</strong>
<p>
A not-so-metaphor: who is weaving the web?
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>Deus Ex Computo Machina2020-04-27T12:00:00+00:002020-04-27T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/026<p>Sibyl Moholy Nagy, architecture critic from the middle of the twentieth century (who was also the spouse of László until his death), maintained great distrust towards computers.
The idea of ‘soft architecture’, which no longer offers a grasp on the world which as we know it, was of ‘absolute horror’ to her:<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
<blockquote>
<p>The destructive analogy of a computer-controlled environment is with the Fascist systems many of us have observed in full action.
It is the same raw drive for power over the livers of the multitude that produces the political dictator and the environmental system-maker.
<mark>It makes no difference whether the Central Control is called Gestapo, Central Intelligence Agency, or Self-organizing, Computer-based Man-Machine System.</mark>
The common denominator is the reduction of personality to ‘a stabilized input-output pattern’ that erodes vitality.</p>
<p>(Sibyl Moholy-Nagy)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Like a forest of moving vines, the increasing technologization of the environment thanks to computers appears to Moholy-Nagy to be the end of the world built and understood by human, now in the hands of a <em>deus ex machina</em>.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>I quote Heyde Heynen in her book on Sibyl Moholy-Nagy: <em>Architecture, Modernism and its Discontents</em> (2018). <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Schizophrene2020-04-30T12:00:00+00:002020-04-30T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/027<p>A personal website is a window towards self.</p>
<p>Is there a way to harmonize our multiple public identities on the web with our offline lives (or is there actually any difference)?</p>
<p>Two options:</p>
<ul>
<li>a single personal site for everything (blog, photography, work profile, etc.), or</li>
<li>several dedicated microsites?</li>
</ul>
<p>I chose the second.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.loupbrun.ca">(www.)loupbrun.ca</a> functions as an index.
It directs to a few subsites with a narrower object.</p>
<p>loupbrun (French for “brownwolf”) is my virtual alter ego, still in digital infancy.
What will he become when he grows up?</p>
<p>One day, he will have to choose.
Put the splitting aside to concentrate himself on single expertise.
Swap the image of the little wolf in favour of a PhD (or better: keep both).</p>
<p>But for now, I prefer the option of the schizophrene.</p>Tools for Conviviality2020-05-04T12:00:00+00:002020-05-04T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/028<p>What is “conviviality?”</p>
<p>In his 1973 book <em>Tools for Conviviality</em>, Ivan Illich suggests people should not be enslaved by, but rather empowered by the tools they use.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><mark>People need new tools to work with rather than tools that ‘work’ for them.</mark>
They need technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has, rather than more well-programmed energy slaves.</p>
<p>(p. 23)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Tools shape—or enable us to shape—our daily lives: how we think, how we work, how we interact with one another.</p>
<p>The “convivial society” seeks personal autonomy and creativity through the means of convivial instrumentation, rather than a productive one.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision.
[…]
<mark>Most tools today cannot be used in a convivial fashion.</mark></p>
<p>(p. 34)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Industrial paradigms—leading to increase of speed, productivity and complexity—has proven incompatible with personal intercourse, as well as with the environment.
Consumer society has reduced personality to an enslaved, unimaginative, impotent pond in an ever more technocratic economy.</p>
<p>The postindustrial era could well be the one of conviviality.
But for it to be reached, more than just tools will be required.</p>The private sphere of Habermas2020-05-08T12:00:00+00:002020-05-08T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/029<p><figure class="Figure invertable">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/029/fenetre-fermee-invertable.png"
alt="A closed window."
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title"></strong>
<p>
A closed window.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>What is private space?</p>
<p>In his 1961 thesis <em>The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere</em>, Jürgen Habermas suggests modelling it as a private sphere where a public window is cut out from the inside.</p>
<p><figure class="Figure invertable">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/029/sphere-privee-invertable.png"
alt="According to Habermas, the public space cuts out a window within the private space."
title="Schematization of the private sphere"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Schematization of the private sphere</strong>
<p>
According to Habermas, the public space cuts out a window within the private space.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>Such a window keeps on growing.</p>
<p>Publicity can reach us nearly anywhere, including the bedroom, one of the most intimate of private spaces.</p>
<p>Why do the large platforms (<abbr title="Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and more.">GAFAM+</abbr>) appear so welcoming?
Because they strive to capture not only our <strong>attention</strong>, but also the slightest of our <strong>interactions</strong>, which are then monetized—hence their interest (against <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/026/">conviviality</a>) in retaining users for as long as possible.</p>
<p>The gluttonous giants are literally robbing our lives <em>from the inside</em>, just as they would for market shares.
<mark>If we do not take action, it is privacy as a whole the giants may wolf down.</mark></p>
<p><figure class="Figure invertable">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/029/biscuit-invertable.png%22"
alt="A cookie eaten from the inside."
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title"></strong>
<p>
A cookie eaten from the inside.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>Code is Law2020-05-13T12:00:00+00:002020-05-13T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/030<p>Code is just text—until it determines how the citizen’s lives are framed.
The code then becomes law.</p>
<p>Lawyer Lawrence Lessig writes in his 2000 short essay <a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html"><em>Code is Law: On Liberty in Cyberspace</em></a> (with ideas from his book <em>Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace</em> published a year before):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The code regulates.
It implements values, or not.
It enables freedoms, or disables them.
It protects privacy, or promotes monitoring. People choose how the code does these things.
People write the code.
Thus the choice is not whether people will decide how cyberspace regulates.
People—coders—will.</p>
<p>(Lawrence Lessig)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Code does not write by itself.</p>
<p>Are the institutions designated for writing laws missing the boat on digital urbanities?</p>
<blockquote>
<p><mark>The law of cyberspace will be how cyberspace codes it, but we will have lost our role in setting that law.</mark></p>
<p>(Lawrence Lessig)</p>
</blockquote>Language and Power2020-05-23T12:00:00+00:002020-05-23T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/031<p>When interested in the structures of power, one must also study language.</p>
<p>In <em>How to Do Things with Words</em> (1962), John Austin distinguishes <strong>factual assertions</strong> from <strong>performative utterances</strong>.
The first are declarative, they contain a descriptive purpose;
the latter are imperative, they conceal a purpose of action.</p>
<p>In <strong>declarative programming</strong>, information is declared through semantic code, like HTML or XML; content is described and can <em>already</em> be read.</p>
<p>In <strong>imperative programming</strong>, one expresses commands to elaborate a controlling structure, which <em>must</em> be executed.</p>
<p>Scripts are apparatuses of power among others.</p>
<p>That is the distinction between a text and a program: read, else obey.</p>Design, Ethics and Technology2020-05-24T15:24:22+00:002020-05-24T15:24:22+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/032<p>During an industrial design symposium held in 1991 in Montréal, designer Ezio Manzini pronounced the following during his opening talk:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How to make a world habitable when its physical reality seems to be melting in a dematerialized continuum of communicative and interactive surfaces, then emerge in the form of waste in all of its thoughtless materiality?
Finding a solution to this problem constitutes the challenge of this ending century.
<mark>Better, this should be the problematic field of design as an activity integrating technique and culture to enable the world to become more habitable.</mark></p>
<p>(Ezio Manzini, 1991)<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Thirty years later, his words could not be more clear-sighted.
The digital realm has accelerated technical penetration in ways that are both deeper and more complex, in every sphere of society, at an increasingly unseizable pace.</p>
<p>The <strong>virtualization</strong> of objects and spaces deprive us from the depth and tangibility which have, until now, constituted our main way of accessing knowledge.
It disrupts our capacity to grasp the world (both by material and intellectual means).
To borrow Manzini’s expression: what does it mean to live in an environment so different from those that preceded it?</p>
<p>Digital spaces trouble the ways we live in the world.
It is urgent we renew its markers.</p>
<p>Today, societies suffer “eternal and whirling transformations”, so much “there is no time left for those slow and spontaneous phenomenons of qualitative refinement and creation of meaning.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is thus this accelerated world which demands for design.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Time—for thinking.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Manzini, Ezio. “Les nouveaux artéfacts et le rôle du designer: fluidification de la matière, accélération du temps et habitabilité du monde” in Findeli, Alain. <em>Prométhée éclairé: éthique, technique et responsabilité professionnelle en design : [actes du symposium international tenu à l’Université de Montréal du 8 au 11 mai 1991]</em>. Montréal: Éditions Informel, 1993. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Hackers2020-05-27T13:30:00+00:002020-05-27T13:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/033<p>Knowledge is power.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The arrest of the free flow of information means the enslavement of the world to the interests of those who profit from information’s scarcity, the vectoral class.
The enslavement of information means the enslavement of its producers to the interests of its owners.
[…]
<mark>Privatising culture, education and communication as commodified content, distorts and deforms its free development, and prevents the very concept of its freedom from its own free development.</mark>
While information remains subordinated to ownership, it is not possible for its producers to freely calculate their interests, or to discover what the true freedom of information might potentially produce in the world.</p>
<p>(McKenzie Wark, <a href="http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html"><em>A Hacker Manifesto [version 4.0]</em></a>)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Knowledge of the habits of others can be monetized through advertisement targeting, which increases its manipulative effect (perlocutionary function of <a href="../31/">langauge</a>).</p>
<p>The <strong>free flow of information</strong> implies ability to access knowledge and know how to use it: it is this double freedom that hackers demand.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but new things.</p>
<p>(McKenzie Wark, <a href="http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html"><em>A Hacker Manifesto [version 4.0]</em></a>)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What are the limits of a system and how does it work?
Such questions are asked by the hacker, who seeks to <strong>understand</strong> the world and to <del>reveal</del> <em>actualize</em> the possibilities.
Hackers are curious, exploring, adventurous, moved by the <em>apolitical</em> quest to democratize knowledge.</p>
<p>Their motivation is neither moral nor immoral: it is simply to <mark>keep pushing the boundaries of knowledge, for the widest possible audience</mark>.</p>Information Materialism2020-05-28T09:25:00+00:002020-05-28T09:25:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/034<p>Information materialism intertwines two fundamental premises: <strong>physical substance</strong>, and <strong>semantic information</strong> (which organizes the former).
Genetic code is an example.</p>
<p>In <em>Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization</em> (2004), Alexander Galloway notes (p. 111):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The “information age”—a term irreverently tossed and to and fro by many critics of contemporary life—is not simply that moment when computers come to dominate, but is instead <mark>that moment in history when matter itself is understood in terms of information or code</mark>.
At this historical moment, protocol becomes a controlling force in social life.</p>
<p>(Alexander Galloway)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Once we understand the world can be approached through cybernetic means, the power resides in mastering <strong>protocol</strong>—that is, the mechanism controlling a distributed network.</p>
<p>Protocol is power.
Without regards to protocol, decentralization will prove to be merely deceiving in achieving true autonomy.</p>Protocol, Code and Language2020-05-30T10:10:00+00:002020-05-30T10:10:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/035<p>What is protocol?</p>
<p>Alexander Galloway’s 2004 book <em>Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization</em> offers an insight into protocol where it intersects with two historically specific technologies: the <strong>digital computer</strong> and the <strong>distributed network</strong>.</p>
<p>A few key elements:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Protocol is a system of distributed management that facilitates peer-to-peer relationships between autonomous entities.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Protocol’s virtues include robustness, contingency, inter-operability, flexibility, heterogeneity, and <mark>pantheism</mark>.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>A goal of protocol is <mark>totality</mark>. It must accept everything, no matter what source, sender, or destination. It consumes diversity, aiming instead for <mark>university</mark>.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Facilitated by protocol, <mark>the Internet is the mostly highly controlled mass media hitherto known</mark>.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Code is the only language that is <mark>executable</mark>, meaning that it is the first discourse that is materially affective.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Protocol creates a (physical or not) system of organization, which makes adhering to the protocol appealing.
The user actually “wants” to follow the protological behavior, for a number of different reasons: it makes sense, it is virtuous, it is effective.</p>
<p><strong>Natural language</strong> (such as French, English, or any other), largely disseminated, is a remarkable form of protocol:
it is self-willingly spoken, advocated for, conformed to—hence “pantheism”.</p>
<p><a href="../031/">Language</a>, being code, is executable—but it can, just like computer code, also be hacked, trafficated.</p>
<p>Studying language also means studying a kind of protocol: a distributed code that can be used by anyone, with all its powers and weaknesses.</p>Knowledge is a Commons2020-06-03T14:50:00+00:002020-06-03T14:50:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/036<p>Today, Sens public is publishing a <a href="http://www.sens-public.org/articles/1522/"><strong>manifesto</strong></a> for the creation and spreading of knowledge.</p>
<p>Breaking up with the current hegemonic practices, the text denounces the subjection of thinking to the hands of a few powerful actors—academic and industrial publishers, which control the majority of the editorial processes.
<strong>Fluidity</strong> and <strong>multiplicity</strong> are praised, among other values, such as collaboration and open culture.</p>
<p>Some ideas:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The rules regulating our spaces of publication are currently established by <mark>academic institutions and private corporations</mark>.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>There is no <em>final</em> version.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Let’s hack the monolithic author! Let’s hack the monolithic text!</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Academic work can be conceived as a wiki; <mark>let’s share it</mark>.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Hackable knowledge requires open licenses and formats, conversational models, an ethics of open engagement, open peer-review and low-tech tools.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>But why?</p>
<blockquote>
<p><mark>The autonomy of knowledge depends on it.</mark></p>
</blockquote>Web Design as Architecture2020-06-06T08:40:00+00:002020-06-06T08:40:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/037<p>Websites are very akin to <strong>public spaces</strong>.</p>
<p><a href="http://www--arc.com/">Web design as architecture</a> serves as “a starting point for a more expansive, and more critical discourse on website design”—which is very welcome indeed:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Websites are inherently public.
Architecture is by nature a public discipline.
Both buildings and websites are built realities.
They are part of the fabric of societies that are now both physical and virtual.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Architecture, as an established discipline, can certainly bring a lot to the web design practice.</p>Technology of the Intellect2020-06-08T09:12:00+00:002020-06-08T09:12:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/038<p>Is thinking merely ideal?</p>
<p>In a 2009 <a href="https://vacarme.org/article1814.html">interview (FR)</a>, anthropologist Jack Goody proposes to consider <strong>writing</strong> as a “technology of the intellect” or “scriptural technique”—which suggests that ideas are firstly anchored in a series of gestures, a <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/004/">technique</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is this link between <mark>tooling of thought and the way of thinking</mark> which is at play with the notion of technology of the intellect: writing enables cognitive operations—making lists, tables, re-examine afterwards, etc.— which increases our intellectual effectiveness, but also qualitatively modifies our understanding of the world.</p>
<p>(Jack Goody)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He also underlines the importance of (political) <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/031/">power</a> of words, which are at the heart of “bureaucratic activity.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[…] writing is a central piece in the government’s paraphernalia</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>[…] writing creates to a social structure</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But the use of words is ambivalent, being able to serve domination as well as emancipation (<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/033/">knowledge is power</a>):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Nevertheless, the mastering of writing emancipates.
To say that it gives power does not reduce it to a tool of oppression.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The text also says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Equality of intelligence, differences of tooling: that is the Goodian universalism.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/028/">tools</a>.
The <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/032">code</a>.
<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/001/">Thought transference</a>.</p>
<p>Words are not innocent.</p>Homodesign2020-06-09T09:00:00+00:002020-06-09T09:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/039<p>Websites, digital <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/037/">public spaces</a> by excellence, are increasingly evacuating multiplicity in favour of more uniform aesthetics.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://vision.soic.indiana.edu/web-project/">study</a> (cited in <a href="https://onezero.medium.com/its-not-just-you-websites-really-do-all-look-the-same-now-d8050b8ea743">this post</a> from OneZero, a blog hosted on <a href="https://medium.com/">Medium</a>, an ironic example of the problem described in the article) suggests that, since 2010, websites have become increasingly homogenous.</p>
<p>What is the problem?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Arguably, the homogenization of design may signal that a <em>few corporations</em> have gained influence over what constitutes proper design on the web.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sam Goree, one of the authors of the study, reminds the irreducible <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/004.html">intrication</a> between form and content:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One of the fundamental principles of design is a <mark>deep and meaningful connection between form and content</mark>; form should both reflect and shape content</p>
<p>(Sam Goree)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Corollary: the uniformization of forms goes hand in hand with the uniformization of ideas—homodesign.</p>Emotional Ethics2020-06-10T08:00:00+00:002020-06-10T08:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/040<p>How teach morals to robots?</p>
<p>It is the question asked by Montréal philosopher Martin Gibert in his book <em>Faire la morale aux robots</em> [Teaching morals to robots] (2020).</p>
<p>One of the greatest challenges facing the “artificial moral agents” (AMA) is the one of <strong>moral perception</strong>: how to perceive what is good and what is bad?</p>
<p>Many philosophers have shown distrust over emotions, preferring cold rationality.
Awaken from his dogmatic slumber<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>, the professor underlines the relevance of the “emotional turn” in philosophy:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Yet when we look at human psychology, many emotions such as <mark>admiration</mark>, <mark>shame</mark>, <mark>pity</mark>, <mark>guilt</mark>, <mark>anger</mark> or <mark>disgust</mark> undeniably have a moral dimension.
Feeling contempt towards someone is condemning what she is or what she does.
Likewise, <mark>empathy</mark> is an emotional mode allowing us to perceive what others feel, a valuable information in any moral decision.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Christine Tappolet, cited by Gibert as an «eminent representative» of the discipline, treats emotions as «perceptions of value.»</p>
<p>The keystone of moral action in artificial intelligence may rely on <strong>empathy</strong>, emotional appanage of humans solely—for now?</p>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/040/morale-robots.jpg"
alt="Martin Gibert, <em>Faire la morale aux robots</em>, Atelier 10, 2020."
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title"></strong>
<p>
Martin Gibert, <em>Faire la morale aux robots</em>, Atelier 10, 2020.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/040/morale-robots-illustration.jpg"
alt="Illustration. <em>Faire la morale aux robots</em>, Atelier 10, 2020."
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title"></strong>
<p>
Illustration. <em>Faire la morale aux robots</em>, Atelier 10, 2020.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Allusion to Kant, who in his <em>Critique of Pure Reason</em>, thanks Hume for awakening him of his “dogmatic slumber.” <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Facebook Must Die2020-06-11T11:00:00+00:002020-06-11T11:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/041<p>You will not die without Facebook.</p>
<p>But Facebook will die <em>without</em> you.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
<p>(And that’s a good thing.)</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>By “you,” I mean, your data. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Solidarity and the Division of Labor2020-06-15T11:15:00+00:002020-06-15T11:15:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/042<p>Sociologist Émile Durkheim noticed, more than a century ago, the damaging effects of the division of labor at scale:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The most remarkable effect of the division of labor is not that it increases output of functions divided, but that it renders them ==solidary==.
Its role… is not simply to embellish or ameliorate existing societies, but to render societies possible which, without it, would not exist….
It passes far beyond purely economic interests, for it consists in the establishment of a social and moral order sui generis.</p>
<p>(Émile Durkheim, <em>The Division of Labor</em>, 1893)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Instead of “reciprocity” and “interdependency” division of labor has rather produced social distance, injustice, and discord.
The fragmentation of society, where the organization is inextricably tied to its economic regime, confines individuals (who become increasingly “solidary”) to powerless atomicity.
<em>Divide and conquer.</em></p>
<p>Should we still worry about the division of society today?</p>
<p>Without a doubt, more than ever.</p>The Two Texts2020-06-15T11:20:00+00:002020-06-15T11:20:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/043<p>In <em>The Age of Surveillance Capitalism</em> (2019), Shoshana Zuboff notices the extreme division of knowledge in today’s society, which much resembles the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/042.html">division of labor</a> recognized by sociologist Émile Durkheim over a century ago.</p>
<p>Zuboff identifies the division mechanism as <strong>the problem of the two texts</strong>.</p>
<p>In the <strong>public-facing text</strong>, we are both the authors and the readers: stories, photos, “likes,” tweets, etc.</p>
<p>But it is merely the entry point for supplying raw material—<mark>behavioral surplus</mark>—to the second, much deeper one, the <strong>shadow text</strong>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Everything that we contribute to the first text, no matter how trivial of fleeting, becomes a target for surplus extraction.
That surplus fills the pages of the second text.
This one is hidden from our view […] and it says more about us than we can know about ourselves.
<mark>Worse still, it becomes increasingly difficult, and perhaps impossible, to refrain from contributing to the shadow text.</mark>
It automatically feeds on our experience as we engage in the normal and necessary routines of social participation.</p>
<p>(Shoshana Zuboff)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This text is deliberately kept inaccessible to the public (and would be anyway impossible to grasp without extremely complex machine intelligence).</p>
<p>The abyssal shadow texts do not only reduce human lives to <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/026.html">input-output patterns</a>, they analyze, predict and eventually modify our behavior, enabling the great oligarchs to “shape the public text to their interests.”</p>Society of Control2020-06-18T15:00:00+00:002020-06-18T15:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/044<p>In his <em>Postscript on the Societies of Control</em> (1990), Gilles Deleuze expands on Michel Foucault’s disciplinary societies, which “initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure.”</p>
<blockquote>
<h2 id="program">Program</h2>
<p>The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an <mark>electronic collar</mark>), is not necessarily one of science fiction.
Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; <mark>what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position—licit or illicit—and effects a universal modulation.</mark></p>
<p>The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the <mark>disciplinary sites of enclosure</mark>, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed.</p>
<p>(Gilles Deleuze)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Thirty years later, this text appears of incredible acuity to describe <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/surveillancecapitalism.html">surveillance capitalism</a> currently at work.</p>
<p>The task is now to identify “the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination,” a <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/035.html">two-faced</a> totalitarian corporatism; the establishment of a new <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/025.html">authority</a>, the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/045.html">platform state</a>.</p>Platform State2020-06-18T15:20:00+00:002020-06-18T15:20:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/045<p>What is the platform state?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Twitter more openly, but also Facebook, Google, Baidu, Tencent, etc. are creating a new form of political power: <mark>the platform state</mark>.</p>
<p>(Pierre Lévy, via <a href="https://twitter.com/plevy/status/1271438977149603841">Twitter</a>)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The expression may only be in its infancy, but the structures of power it expresses are, on the opposite, very much developed.
It is urgent to understand them, lest their reversal become impossible.</p>
<p>A few (preliminary) questions to define the power of the platform state:</p>
<ul>
<li>What is its nature?</li>
<li>From where does it pull its legitimacy?</li>
<li>What fuels it?</li>
<li>What is its reach, how far does it span?</li>
<li>Who exercises it?</li>
<li>How can it be negociated?</li>
</ul>
<p>Pierre Levy is <a href="https://twitter.com/plevy/status/1271477064298889223">working</a> on the concept.
To be continued.</p>Infobesity Before We Knew It2020-06-20T11:00:00+00:002020-06-20T11:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/046<blockquote>
<p>Today we are inundated with such an immense flood of <del>printed</del> matter that the value of the individual work has depreciated, for our harassed contemporaries simply cannot take everything that is printed today.
<mark>It is the typographer’s task to divide up and organize and interpret this mass of</mark> <del>printed</del> <mark>matter</mark> in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to him.</p>
<p>(Emil Ruder, 1969) <sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> <sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The problem described by Ruder has probably never been more crucial than the information overload (or <strong>infobesity</strong>) we experience today.</p>
<p>Who are the contemporary “typographers” whose work, more crucial than ever, helps us navigate through the current deluge?</p>
<p>They are the architects of databases, the writers of computer code, the printers of websites, the graphic designers of fluid interfaces, the drawers of variable fonts, the community managers – but especially, those in control of the <strong>editorialization apparatuses</strong>, the super-structures which determine our very access to information itself.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Strikethrough by me. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>Passage via <a href="https://ia.net/topics/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period">this post</a> by Oliver Reichenstein. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Everyone Objectified2020-06-22T09:00:00+00:002020-06-22T09:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/047<p>What is the problem with mass surveillance?</p>
<p>In a post <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/07/surveillance-privacy-philosophy-data-internet-things"><em>The philosophy of privacy: why surveillance reduces us to objects</em></a>, philosopher Michael P. Lynch exposes the tension between <strong>individual autonomy</strong> (the freedom of making decisions) and <strong>structural control</strong> over mass personal data collection (which renders behavior).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You may “freely” click on the “buy” button in the heat of the moment – indeed, corporations count on it – without that decision reflecting what really matters to you in the long run.
Decisions like that might be “free” but they are not fully autonomous.
Someone who makes a <mark>fully autonomous decision</mark>, in contrast, is committed to that decision; <mark>she owns it</mark>.</p>
<p>(Michael P. Lynch)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Being in control of one’s own <strong>data</strong> therefore means taking ownership of one’s <strong>decisions</strong>.</p>
<p>To renounce on behavioral data means giving up the keys of one’s free will.</p>
<p>The systematic collection of data is a <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/043.html">two-face</a> device of power.
Its invisible counterpart is a <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/025.html">web-like structure</a> that is being built around us.
We are slowly losing the very possibility of escaping it—and along with it the conditions of true decision-making.</p>
<p>What is a <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/053.html">human life</a> without self-determination, if not merely rendered as another <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/026.html">input-output</a> object?</p>Siren Songs of the Machines2020-07-23T08:00:00+00:002020-07-23T08:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/048<p><figure class="Figure invertable">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/048/illustration-double-face-invertable.png"
alt="Two faces, one smiling, the other is obscured."
title="Two Faces"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Two Faces</strong>
<p>
Two faces, one smiling, the other is obscured.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>In <em>Hertzian Tales</em> (1999), Anthony Dunne establishes the foundations for <strong>critical design</strong><sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>—especially with the intrusion of electronic devices in everyday life.</p>
<p>Quoting Paul Virilio, Dunne introduces the concept of <strong>user-friendliness</strong> through its rhetorical, yet instrumentarian counterpart:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>According to Virilio (1995):
Interactive user-friendliness … is just a metaphor for the <mark>subtle enslavement of the human being to “intelligent” machines</mark>; a programmed symbiosis of man and computer … the total, unavowed disqualification of the human in favor of the definitive instrumental conditioning of the individual.</p>
<p>(Anthony Dunne)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“User-friendliness” therefore takes on an ironic, sophistic turn: by exposing only the smiling, “friendly” facette and hiding the other, <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/043.html">shadow programme</a>, the device exacerbates the division of learning, keeping the exploitees from understanding the (new) underlying structures of power.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The easy communication and transparency striven for by champions of user-friendliness simply make our seduction by machines more comfortable.</p>
<p>(Anthony Dunne)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Objects embody (hidden) values that, if we do not question them, ultimately end up in institutions—profiting those who <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/030.html">programmed</a> them in the first place.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Although transparency might improve efficiency and performance, it limits the potential richness of our engagement with the emerging electronic environment and <mark>encourages unthinking assimilation of the ideologies embedded in electronic objects</mark>.
Instead, the distance between ourselves and the environment of electronic objects might be “poetized” to encourage <mark>skeptical sensitivity</mark> to the values and ideas this environment embodies.
This could be done in a number of ways, of which the most promising is a form of <mark>functional estrangement</mark>: “para-functionality.”</p>
<p>(Anthony Dunne)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As Dunne notes, user-unfriendliness needs not to be “user-hostile”—constructive user-unfriendliness already exists in poetry, which Bertolt Brecht’s distancing illustrates eloquently: keeping the spectator critically awake, unfooled by the fiction set before their eyes, thanks to an “estrangement effect.”</p>
<p>Resisting the siren song of the machines.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>A more detailed <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262371319_What_is_critical_about_critical_design">article</a> by Jeffrey and Shaowen Bardzell examines the concept of critical design in the scope of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s works, where the term was originally coined. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Knowledge: Ultimate Power2020-07-24T14:00:00+00:002020-07-24T14:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/049<blockquote>
<p><mark>Knowledge is power.</mark>
If one possesses a collection of the “universal knowledge” of the world, one has ultimate power.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is how Gerlinde Schuller opens the preface of her book <em>Designing Universal Knowledge</em> (2009).</p>
<p><a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/043.html">Asymmetry of knowledge</a> create asymmetry of power—more than ever in the age of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/informationenvironments.html">information environments</a> and <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/surveillancecapitalism.html">surveillance capitalism</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Apart from those producing information, designers, scientists and academics have a great influence on how knowledge is communicated.
<mark>They set standards for the classification and design of complex data and can facilitate but also manipulate the transfer of knowledge.</mark></p>
<p>(Gerlinde Schuller)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Those who organize information, who control the means access to it or who simply understand knowledge, in its <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/012.html">increasing complexity</a>, set the stage for a new, unprecedented <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/045.html">regime of power</a>.</p>Graphical Illusion2020-10-03T20:00:00+00:002020-10-03T20:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/062<p>In his book <cite>Critical Code Studies</cite> (2020), Mark C. Marino brings back the graphical illusion from media theorist Friedrich Kittler:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Anticipating today’s discussions of “fake news” and digital media manipulation, Kittler argues that computer graphics are prone to <mark>falsification</mark> to a degree far beyond photography.</p>
<footer>Mark C. Marino, 174</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky (<cite>Manufacturing Consent</cite>) have abundantly criticized <strong>manipulation in mass media</strong>, Kittler goes further:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The deception for Kittler goes beyond the manipulation of images produced or edited on the machine and into the interface of contemporary operating systems.
Kittler points to the ways … that <mark>operations become invisible in the graphical user interface</mark>.
The operating system presents its interface as transparent “windows” or a background “desktop,” even though it is a construction of graphics.
These windows are hardly transparent as they keep users, especially those who cannot pass through the windows, subjugated to Microsoft and Apple.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Marino calls for <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/023.html">intellectuals</a> to take part in the debate on <strong>technique</strong> (which is also about <strong>beauty</strong> and aesthetics):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If technology is insufficient, who can intervene?
<mark>Philosophers.</mark>
Specifically, philosophers who are willing to enact processes to understand reality, also known as <em>phenomenology</em>.
Philosophers experiment to understand reality.
For example, Kittler presents Kant’s formulation of Beauty, the “optical gestalt,” as a “mechanism of recognition,” to ruminate on the conditions of aesthetic representation.
…
<mark>Thus, in the world of idealized images, the human philosopher must report for duty.</mark></p>
<footer>Mark C. Marino, 175</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>In a society increasingly under the yoke of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/informationarchitecture.html"><strong>information architecture</strong></a>, Marino reminds us the critical urgency of understanding the code that hides behind polished interfaces, not to be fooled by mere <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/048.html">appearances</a>.</p>
<p>Philosophers have always strived for the <strong>truth</strong>, their mission should not fall short before any technological mirage.</p>Condensing Information2020-07-24T14:30:00+00:002020-07-24T14:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/050<p>Must simplicity and complexity be complete opposites?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As a criterion of classification, simplicity can be described as <mark>“well-structured,”</mark> complexity as poorly structured.
Hence, complex forms can be well-structured and therefore simple, but also poorly structured and therefore complex.
Donald Judd, the master of Minimalism, put his finger on it by saying that complicated, incidentally, is the opposite of simple, not complex, which both may be.</p>
<p>(Markus Frenzl, 2009; Donald Judd, <em>Möbel Furniture, Zürich, 1986</em>)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Simplicity therefore complements complexity, rather than <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/012.html">competing</a> against it.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Simplicity can also be understood as <mark>condensed information</mark> instead of filtered information.
It makes complexity understandable instead of eliminating it.</p>
<p>(Markus Frenzl)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Abusive simplification can also obfuscate information, just as <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/048.html">deceiving interfaces</a> do.</p>The Laws of Simplicity2020-07-25T07:00:00+00:002020-07-25T07:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/051<p>In his 2006 book <em>The Laws of Simplicity</em>, John Maeda poses the ten principles of <strong>simplicity</strong>:</p>
<blockquote>
<h2 id="1-reduce">1. Reduce</h2>
<p>The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.</p>
<h2 id="2-organize">2. Organize</h2>
<p>Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.</p>
<h2 id="3-time">3. Time</h2>
<p>Savings in time feel like simplicity.</p>
<h2 id="4-learn">4. Learn</h2>
<p>Knowledge makes everything simpler.</p>
<h2 id="5-differences">5. Differences</h2>
<p><a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/051.html">Simplicity and complexity</a> need each other.</p>
<h2 id="6-context">6. Context</h2>
<p>What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.</p>
<h2 id="7-emotion">7. Emotion</h2>
<p>More emotions are better than less.</p>
<h2 id="8-trust">8. Trust</h2>
<p>In simplicity we trust.</p>
<h2 id="9-failure">9. Failure</h2>
<p>Some things can never be made simple.</p>
<h2 id="10-the-one">10. The One</h2>
<p>Simplicity is about subtracting the <del>obvious</del>, and adding the <mark>meaningful</mark>.</p>
</blockquote>Post-optimal2020-07-26T17:00:00+00:002020-07-26T17:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/052<p>What is the post-optimal object?</p>
<p>In <em>Hertzian Tales</em> (1999), Anthony Dunne presents the concept of optimal object through the lense of its <strong>function</strong>: the more efficiently it performs, the more it is optimized.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In a world where practicality and functionality can be taken for granted, the aesthetics of the <mark>post-optimal</mark> object could provide new experiences of everyday life, new poetic dimensions.</p>
<p>(Anthony Dunne)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“Post-optimal” can therefore be understood as thinking beyond function-oriented design, with performance no longer as the main (or sole) measure of its sucess.</p>
<p>Dunne underlines the fact that democratization of certain technology has given rise to a new discriminating criterium: <strong>aesthetic experience</strong>.
A rich person may not be able to purchase a more performant device, such as a camera, simply because she has more money, but as suggests Peter Dormer she can decide to have it gold plated, which may (or may not) transform the aesthetic experience, though it its primary utility remains functionnally unchanged.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The most difficult challenge for designers of electronic objects now lie in technical and semiotic functionality, where optimal levels of performance are already attainable, but in the realms of <mark>metaphysics</mark>, <mark>poetry</mark>, and <mark>aesthetics</mark>, where little research has been carried out.</p>
<p>(Anthony Dunne)</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>To poetize the world</strong>: that is the (new?) task for designers; bring into the world innovative experiences, unusual sensations, unprecedented perspectives.
What art has always done, alas too often outside everyday life (museums, theatres, and other sanctuarized spaces), design—schizophrenic discipline which brings together the rigour of the engineer and the delicacy of the poet, the choreography of the director and the technical ability of the performer, the social proximity of the urban planner and the analytic distance of the philosopher—aims to achieve every day.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Design responds to a fundamental need: to enchant existence at every instant.</p>
<p>(Stéphane Vial)</p>
</blockquote>Machines as Human Metaphors2020-07-27T09:00:00+00:002020-07-27T09:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/053<p>What roles should machines play in society?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The use of machines has radically transformed the nature of productive activity and has left its mark on the imagination, thoughts, and feelings of humans throughout the ages.
Scientists have produced mechanistic interpretations of the natural world, and philosophers and psychologists have articulated mechanistic theories of human mind and behaviour.
Increasingly, we have learned to use the machines as a metaphor for ourselves and our society and to <mark>mold our world in accordance with mechanical principles</mark>.</p>
<p>(Gareth Morgan, <em>Images of Organization</em>)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What are the dangers of machine-like efficiency?</p>
<p>Morgan notes that mechanically structured organizations—<strong>bureaucracies</strong>—suffer from their strong rigidities: they are mindless, unquestionable, unadapting, dehumanizing.</p>
<p>When everything works like clockwork, performance and efficiency can be improved to an <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/052.html">“optimal” state</a>; but shouldn’t such optimization be downgraded in favour of more progressive, humane values, despite its “regression” looks?</p>
<p>Expanding of the social failures of corporate and institutional <strong>automatization</strong>, Shoshana Zuboff warns us against the unsung consequences of the programmatic deployment of instrumentarian architectures at large scale:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This “seventh extinction” will not be of nature but of <mark>what has been held most precious in human nature</mark>: the will to will, the sanctity of the individual, the ties of intimacy, the sociality that binds us together in promises, and the trust they breed.
The dying off of this human future will be just as unintended as any other.</p>
<p>(Shoshana Zuboff, <em>The Age of Surveillance Capitalism</em>)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We shall not surrender our humanity to the existence of thoughtless, choiceless machine behaviour.
Let us <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/033.html">hack</a> the programme which the smiling—although not <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/048.html">friendly</a>—<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/026.html"><em>deus ex machina</em></a> has built for us, freeing ourselves from the planned behaviour over which those in power exert their control.</p>
<p>There is no single narrative.</p>Information2020-07-29T14:20:00+00:002020-07-29T14:20:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/054<p>What is an information?</p>
<p>In a 1987 speech <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ybvyj_Pk7M"><em>L’art et les sociétés de contrôle</em></a> <em>[Art and the societies of control]</em>, Gilles Deleuze suggests viewing information as a system of power:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Everyone knows it: information is a series of <mark>words of order</mark>.</p>
<p>(Gilles Deleuze)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Beyond such “evidence” at first off-putting, Deleuze underlines the importance of this definition to approach the “control system” at play in the information society:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Which is to say that information is exactly the system of control.
…
It is obvious except that it concerns us today in particular because we are entering in a society that we could qualify as a <mark>society of control</mark>.</p>
<p>(Gilles Deleuze)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“To inform” is the act of saying “what you are supposed to believe.”
“Information” is a one-way communication broadcasted by its emitter; it is not discussable, it is not part of a dialectic process; it is simply emitted in order to be received as-is.</p>
<h2 id="is-knowledge-power">Is knowledge power?</h2>
<p>The authority of a given knowledge is <strong>distributed</strong> in various fields of expertise, which may be discussed, questioned, reconfigured.</p>
<p>“Information” therefore deserves to be distinguished from <strong>knowledge</strong>, which is a priori free from any kind of grasp or restriction—except if the tools and the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/035.html">protocols</a> to manipulate it are not.</p>
<p>Information is an order, an imperative; <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/049.html">knowledge</a> is a <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/034.html">convivial</a>, democratic tool.</p>
<p>But in the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/informationenvironments.html">information environments</a>—and even more in a (hyper)connected society—over which merely a few giants have control, knowledge can become the material for a apparatus of power, the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/025.html">mesh</a> of a system of control.</p>The Virtual2020-07-31T11:40:00+00:002020-07-31T11:40:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/055<p><em>What is the virtual?</em></p>
<p>In his 1995 book <em>Becoming Virtual</em>, Pierre Lévy attempts to define the concept, which remains subject to a widespread confusion:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Consider the simple and misleading opposition between the real and the virtual.
As it is currently used, the word “virtual” is often meant to signify the absence of existence ….</p>
</blockquote>
<p>However, Lévy warns us upfront that it has “little relationship to that which is false, illusory, or imaginary;”
quite the contrary, the virtual is a <strong>mode of existence</strong>; it is simply latent, waiting for its opposite mode to appear, the <em>actual</em>.</p>
<p>Virtualization is the process allowing us to problematize the world, to imagine its possibilities, to reconfigure it, or even to dream it so that one day it can be actualized.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><mark>Virtualization is one of the principal vectors in the creation of reality.</mark></p>
<p>(Pierre Lévy)</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Art</strong> and <strong>language</strong> are examples of virtualization by excellence.</p>
<p>The technological fragmentation, which is often associated with “dematerialization” and “deterritorialization” (which gives rise to chimerical metaphors like the “cloud” in the computer world), crystallizes as much as it diffracts the concept of virtual, which has not arrived with the digital itself.</p>
<p>It may be because it multiplies our relationships with the real—distributed architectures, simulation devices, <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/informationenvironments.html">information environments</a>—that the virtual is so destabilizing.
Its understanding appears increasingly critical to understand the complexity of our world:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Isn’t the fundamental architecture and design of our epoch based on the hyperbody, the hypercortex, the new economy of events and the abundance, the fluctuating space of knowledge?</p>
<p>(Pierre Lévy)</p>
</blockquote>Panopticon2020-08-03T13:30:00+00:002020-08-03T13:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/056<p>What is a <em>panopticon</em>?</p>
<p>Imagined by philosopher Jeremy Bentham to design the ideal prison, the <em>Panopticon</em> (1780) is a single viewpoint allowing a guard to watch each prisoner without being seen in return.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The essence of it consists, then, in the <em>centrality</em> of the inspector’s situation, combined with the well-known and most effectual contrivances for <em>seeing without being seen</em>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bentham insists that the main feature resides in the fact that every inmate can be <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/055.html">virtually</a> observed at any moment, without the need for <em>actual</em> continuous monitoring—behaviour becomes self-disciplined, <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/035.html">protocol</a>, machine-like:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You will please to observe, that though perhaps it is the most important point, that the persons to be inspected should always feel themselves as if under inspection, at least as standing a great chance of being so
….
This is material in <em>all</em> cases, that the inspector may have the satisfaction of knowing, that <mark>the discipline actually has the effect which it is designed to have</mark>
….
I mean, the apparent <em>omnipresence</em> of the inspector (if divines will allow me the expression,) combined with the extreme facility of his <em>real presence</em>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, is the panopticon just “a simple idea in Architecture,” as Bentham has put it?</p>
<p>The idea of the panopticon should be reexamined today, on one hand because its realization has been made technically possible through the means of <strong>electronics</strong><sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> (rather than optics); on the other hand, because it concerns society taken in its totality, well beyond the limits of an isolated institution.</p>
<p>Mass surveillance exercised by a few large private companies—whose <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/025.html">structures of power</a> have been rendered invisible despite their growing presence—represents an insidious and unfettered incarnation of this unprecedented form of power: a global, hungry, data-driven, corporate-centric panopticon in the 21<sup>st</sup> century.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>For example, following Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations on the deployment of mass surveillance systems across the world. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Anti-environments2020-08-12T13:00:00+00:002020-08-12T13:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/057<blockquote>
<p>… every new technology creates a new environment just as a motor car does, as the railway did, or as the radio and airplanes do—any technology changes the whole human environment ….</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p><mark>New media are new environments.</mark>
That is why the media are the message.</p>
<p>(Marshall McLuhan, <em>The Invisible Environment</em>, 1967)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The medium according to McLuhan is not just a mere vehicle for information: it is the transparent, albeit real <strong>substance</strong> which enables the very existence of information, and it has probably never been more invisible than with the coming of virtual and information environments, so <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/032.html">different</a> from what we have always known.</p>
<p>When the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/025.html">structures</a> of our environment become invisible, it is up to the artists, scientists and <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/023.html">intellectuals</a> of today to show them to us through <strong>anti-environnements</strong> (or <strong>counter-environnements</strong>):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One related consideration is that <mark>anti-environments</mark>, or counter-environments created by the artist, are indispensable means of becoming aware of the environment, the one in which we live and the one we create for ourselves technically.</p>
<p>(Marshall McLuhan)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Anti-environments may appear hostile at first, but it is their contrasting nature which gives rise to our understanding of the world around us.</p>
<p>To transgress the barriers of perception, which are in turn conditioned by our surrounding environment: that is the violent but necessary role of artists, scientists and <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/033.html">hackers</a>—at the risk of being considered “enemies” of society.</p>Real(istic) Dreamers2020-09-05T12:00:00+00:002020-09-05T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/058<blockquote>
<p>When a dream is important—now, a dream by definition is not realistic.
Perhaps one should talk about aspirations rather than dreams because in the back of your mind, if you understand the materials, or if you understand society and human relationships, you know that it should be possible to do something.
There are people who are considered dreamers, who had aspirations for society, which were never realized during their lifetime.
I wouldn’t call those people dreamers in that way out sense.
We say we do refer to them as dreamers.
In architecture, I would credit those realistic dreamers who are like da Vinci….
<mark>It is sometimes very difficult to make the distinction between them and the way our dreamers who are just out of thin air.</mark>
A lot of the people who are considered imaginative today—and it’s not dreaming from purpose.
There’s enough in the reality of the world to provide the aspiration for dreams which are somehow one day realizable.</p>
<p>(Blanche Lemco van Ginkel)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Some writers for example will suggest that it is precisely by inventing parallel worlds that we will imagine new possibilities, by creating utopias that we know—or think we know—to be unrealizable, at least to strive to or to broaden the horizon of our current imagination.</p>
<p>And others prefer <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/014.html">feasible utopias</a>.</p>What Is Editorialization?2020-09-08T07:30:00+00:002020-09-08T07:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/059<p>What is editorialization and why is it useful?</p>
<p>For philosopher Marcello Vitali-Rosati, editorialization is no less than a philosophical theory: it allows us to <strong>understand</strong> and <strong>build</strong> the world.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Because it underlines the structure, editorialization gives us the possibility of <mark>understanding digital space and understanding the meaning of our actions in that space</mark>: it reveals us the relationships between objects, dynamics, the forces, the apparatuses of power, the sources of authority.</p>
<p>(Marcello Vitali-Rosati, «<a href="https://journals.openedition.org/revuehn/371">Pour une théorie de l’éditorialisation</a>» in <em>Humanités numériques</em>, vol. 1, 2020.)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The theory of editorialization has an <strong>epistemological</strong> aspect (it allows us to understand the world).</p>
<p>In a digital connected world, to exist is to be editorialized.</p>
<p>To be an individual with social connection means being on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn; to be a restaurant means being “findable” on Google, Apple or Yelp maps.</p>
<p>From this existential observation, the theory has an <strong>ontological</strong> aspect (it tells us something about being and the mode of existence of things).</p>
<p>Marcello speaks of a <strong>true architecture</strong>—not a <em>metaphorical</em> one—of spaces that we actually inhabit.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Digital space is not a parallel space, it is the main space of our life, or to be more precise, the space where our lives emerge.
<mark>It is therefore fundamental that we keep a watch so that this space promotes—or at least permits—the values which are important to us</mark>—whatever those values are.</p>
<p>(Marcello Vitali-Rosati)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Human future in these new spaces has its own issues regarding individual and collective autonomy.
The theory of editorialization, with its <strong>political</strong> aspect, also allows us to reflect on the issues regarding power and sovereignty.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><mark>Digital literacy</mark> becomes a condition of possibility to avoid us becoming puppets animated only by the constraints and the determinations of the forces constructing our space.</p>
<p>(Marcello Vitali-Rosati)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To understand the world (digital or not), it is also being able to act upon it.</p>
<h2 id="a-broadened-definition">A broadened definition</h2>
<p>Definition of editorialization in 2016:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Editorialization is the set of dynamics that produce and structure digital space.
These dynamics can be understood as the interactions of individual and collective actions within a particular digital environment.</p>
<p>(<a href="http://www.sens-public.org/articles/1059/">Marcello Vitali-Rosati</a>, 2016)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Revised definition of editorialization in 2020:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Editorialization is the set of dynamics that constitute digital space and that allow, following this constitution, the emerging of meaning.
These dynamics are the result of different forces and actions which determine after the fact the appearance and the identification of particular objects (people, communities, algorithms, platforms…).</p>
<p>(<a href="https://journals.openedition.org/revuehn/371">Marcello Vitali-Rosati</a>, 2020)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The fusion of these two definitions:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Editorialization is the set of dynamics that <del>produce and structure</del> constitute digital space <ins>and that allow, following this constitution, the emerging of meaning</ins>.
These dynamics <del>can be understood as</del> <ins>are the result of different forces and actions</ins> <del>the interactions of individual and collective actions within a particular digital environment</del> <ins>which determine after the fact the appearance and the identification of particular objects (persons, communities, algorithms, platforms…)</ins>.</p>
</blockquote>Technology and Humanities2020-09-15T12:00:00+00:002020-09-15T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/060<p>At the end of the presentation announcing the release of a new iPad, Steve Jobs concluded with the following statement:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Technology alone is not enough.
That it’s technology married with <mark>liberal arts</mark>, married with the <mark>humanities</mark> that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.</p>
<p>(Steve Jobs)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Behind the monological rhetoric of the demonstrator (siren words to entrust to buy a product), we can nevertheless catch a glimpse a crucial, even radical proposition within our current digital society and the underlying technocracy (i.e., the technical power of computer giants, the oligarchy formed by the <abbr title="Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and others.">GAFAM+</abbr>): placing <strong>humanist ideals</strong> in the spotlight next to <strong>technique</strong>, <strong>technology</strong>.
We often put the machine as an opposing entity to human beings, as if, since the catalysis of the industrial era, machine-<em>ization</em> had become linked linearly to dehumanization.</p>
<p>This has effectively proven true in many cases.</p>
<p>The political question of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/028.html">tooling</a> set aside (to be in control of one’s own tools, or to be controlled by the tools of an external entity, such as a corporation), the <strong>poetic prospect</strong> of Jobs may allow us to move beyond human-machine dualism, beyond the mutual exclusion of the two.</p>
<p>In a hyperconnected world where demagogues are constantly taking the floor in today’s public places, we can still be optimistic towards the future of liberal arts in society.</p>Inhabitable Information2020-09-24T13:00:00+00:002020-09-24T13:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/061<p>In a 1970 announcement, the president of Xerox (a company which was at the <em>avant-garde</em> of computer systems and whose innovations allowed to produce the first successful personal computers) Charles Peter McColough speaks of the inhabitability of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/informationenvironments.html">information environments</a><sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><del>The basic purpose of Xerox Corporation is to find the best means to bring greater order and discipline to information.</del>
<del>Thus our fundamental thrust, our common denominator, has evolved toward establishing leadership in what we call the <strong>architecture of information</strong>.</del>
What we seek is to think of information itself as a <mark>natural and undeveloped environment</mark> which can be enclosed and made more <mark>habitable</mark> for the people who live and work within it.</p>
<footer>Charles Peter McColough, 1970</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>To quote a question from Molly Wright Steenson:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What does it mean for information to be inhabitable? This is an <mark>explicitly architectural</mark> problem.</p>
<footer>Molly Wright Steenson, 2013</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>We live in the clouds and graphical interfaces (although some people still spend their days in dark-screen terminals) where we are more than ever exposed to “friendly”, fallacious metaphors; notifications extract our attention; we use digital tools to think, work and communicate (which in return are also working on our thoughts, according to Kittler).</p>
<p>The <strong>architecture</strong> of <strong>information environments</strong> was not born yesterday, and yet we seem to be completely helpless in front of it.</p>
<ul>
<li>What is our relationship toward “smart” objects?</li>
<li>Why do we accept certain technologies in our lives with voluntary and passive enslavement?</li>
<li>Can we understand this “new” architecture that formats our everyday framework?</li>
<li>Who are the architects and what hides in their <strong>programmes</strong>?</li>
</ul>
<p>To understand what it means to “inhabit” information, we need a language: the language of <strong>information architecture</strong>.</p>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/061/numerique-architecture.jpg"
alt="CCA / Sternberg Press, 2017."
title="Quand le numérique marque-t-il l'architecture?"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Quand le numérique marque-t-il l’architecture?</strong>
<p>
CCA / Sternberg Press, 2017.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Xerox: <cite>Searching for an Architecture of Information, an address by Charles Peter McColough, President, Xerox Corporation, before the New York Society of Security Analysts, March 3, 1970, via Louis Murray Weitzman, <cite>The Architecture of Information</cite>, 1995. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Architecture And The Digital: Sound2020-10-07T16:00:00+00:002020-10-07T16:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/063<p>How can we think <strong>digital spaces</strong> from an architectural point of view, since the nature of these spaces is fundamentally different from physical space?</p>
<p>In his text <cite>Toward a Museology of Algorithmic Architectures Generated from Within</cite> (in <cite>When Is The Digital in Architecture?</cite>, 2017), Wolfgang Ernst invites to consider architecture from its archives, bringing <strong>materiality</strong> to the forefront.</p>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/063/architecture-sonicity-highlight.jpg"
alt="Screenshot, <cite>Toward a Museology of Algorithmic Architectures From Within</cite>, 2017."
title="«Architecture Sonicity: Listening to Computer Architecture with Media-Archaeological Ears»"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">«Architecture Sonicity: Listening to Computer Architecture with Media-Archaeological Ears»</strong>
<p>
Screenshot, <cite>Toward a Museology of Algorithmic Architectures From Within</cite>, 2017.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>More precisely, Ernst invites the reader to consider digital architecture through <strong>sound processes</strong>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Computational space can be made viable not only by metaphorically wandering through the inside of technical computer architecture.
We should pay special attention to the sound-related epistemology, the <mark>sonicity</mark>, of architectures, which are not physical spaces, but rather closer to Marshall McLuhan’s structural notion of <mark>acoustic space</mark>.</p>
<footer>Wolfgang Ernst</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Architecture can therefore be understood not as <em>space</em> per se, but by <strong>processes</strong>, and in particular through an <strong>epistemology of sound</strong> reflecting structure and movement.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Since the essence of digital computing is the literal temporalization of mathematics by media-operative algorithms, <mark>we must change the sensational mode from the visual to the auditory, the time organ of human senses</mark>.
…
Since architecture is becoming more processual as it becomes more digital, its true archive, which consists of its driving algorithms, must be displayed to our <mark>time-critical auditory sense</mark>.</p>
<footer>Wolfgang Ernst</footer>
</blockquote>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/063/xenakis-etude-metastaseis.jpg"
alt="Iannis Xenakis, Study for Metastaseis (A), 1954. Collection Famille Xenakis."
title="Drawings for stochastic music"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Drawings for stochastic music</strong>
<p>
Iannis Xenakis, Study for Metastaseis (A), 1954. Collection Famille Xenakis.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>Architect and composer <strong>Iannis Xenakis</strong> is one of the rare figures to have explored the relationships between computers, mathematics, architecture, and music.</p>
<p>The mathematization of the musical partition attempted by Xenakis, however exceptional and experimental, could be more than just a historical curiosity—maybe a (new) place to start for the understanding of <strong>digital architecture</strong>.</p>Rhetorical Medium2020-10-13T12:00:00+00:002020-10-13T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/064<p>Fascinated by his readings of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/marshallmcluhan.html">Marshall McLuhan</a>, computer scientist Alan Kay, pioneer in graphical user interfaces, acknowledges in a 1989 text<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> the rhetorical dimension of the tools we use every day (and how they manipulate us in return).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When [Marshall McLuhan] said “the medium is the message” he meant that you have to become the medium if you use it.</p>
<p>That’s pretty scary.
It means that even though humans are animals that shape tools, <mark>it is the nature of tools that shape us</mark>.</p>
<footer>Alan Kay</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Which brings Kay to voluntarily conflate <strong>tools</strong> and <strong>medium</strong> (“The computer is a medium!” he realizes suddenly).</p>
<p>Kay notes that the medium is itself rhetorical: it shapes the way we perceive the message; it is the very nature of the medium to convince us, to manipulate us—it is up to us to read it, with more or less literacy and critical distance.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The ability to “read” a medium means you can <mark><em>access</em> materials and tools created by others</mark>.
The ability to “write” in a medium means you can generate materials and tools for others.
You must have both to be literate.
In print writing, the tools you generate are <mark>rhetorical</mark>; they demonstrate and convince.
<mark>In computer writing, the tools you generate are processes; they simulate and decide.</mark></p>
<footer>Alan Kay</footer>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Literacy</strong>, precisely: how do we read a medium presented to us as an <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/062.html">illusion</a>, a metaphor where the <strong>processes</strong> (“<strong>simulations</strong> and <strong>decisions</strong>”) are kept out of reach and whose code we cannot read?</p>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/064/illustration-ordinateur.jpg"
alt="A computer with a pointer, a mouse, and a window-shaped graphical interface."
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title"></strong>
<p>
A computer with a pointer, a mouse, and a window-shaped graphical interface.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>What should we do when the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/063.html">architecture</a> of the medium is no longer characterized by spatial geometry, but by a chronotopy of <strong>processes</strong>?</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Alan Kay, <cite>User Interface: A Personal View</cite> in <cite>Multimedia: from Wagner to virtual reality</cite>, 1989, p. 121-131. (<a href="https://www.dgsiegel.net/files/refs/Kay%20-%20User%20Interface:%20A%20Personal%20View.pdf">Text in PDF format</a>) <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Architecture and Information Theory2020-10-22T14:30:00+00:002020-10-22T14:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/065<p>What is the role of the architect in the context of a society where inhabitants are increasingly <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/061.html">living</a> in digital spaces—which are in fact information (or communication) architectures?</p>
<p>Before the new challenges posed by mass design (the technical reality of the 1960s being extremely different from that of today), visionary architect <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/yonafriedman.html">Yona Friedman</a> (1923-2019) suggested a new epistemology through the use of <strong>information technology</strong>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><del>Yona Friedman saw these problems of design, information and production as interdependent and considered the challenges of scale to be incompatible with the classical atelier approach.</del>
His solution was nothing less than the transformation of architecture into an information-processing discipline, and the Flatwriter was the key catalyst of this transformation.</p>
<footer>Andrew Witt, <cite>The Machinic Animal: Autonomic Networks And Behavioral Computation</cite> in <cite>When Is The Digital In Architecture?</cite>, 2017</footer>
</blockquote>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/065/yona-friedman-flatwriter.jpg"
alt="Yona Friedman, «About the Flatwriter», 1967"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title"></strong>
<p>
Yona Friedman, «About the Flatwriter», 1967
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>Friedman’s Flatwriter consisted of a “choice machine”, allowing inhabitants to enter design parameters and produce architecture configurations by themselves, according to their own needs.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Since the architect was increasingly a medium for information, Friedman saw the whole notion of design epistemology as essentially interchangeable with information theory.
<mark>Thus the challenge of architecture in an information age was to recast it as a communicable—and thus encapsulable—process.</mark>
The architect is a channel, the client a transmitter and the architecture a receiver.</p>
<footer>Andrew Witt</footer>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Thus the design of a new role for the architect also implied the development of new heuristic and communication technologies.</p>
<footer>Andrew Witt</footer>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>The Flatwriter marks an expansive and ambitious attempt to use networks—operational and communicational—to create entirely new design ecology, and with it a new kind of architecture.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>By examining the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (1953-1968) where courses on operational research, information theory, and graph theory (among others) were taught, Andrew Witt shows the concern of showing techniques to achieve a maybe more objective design—without, however, reducing it to pure cybernetics (<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/026.html">input-output</a> systems) or mere computation models.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Moreover the Ulm project created an expectation of technical literacy in the designer, which made scripting and custom software development a feasible—indeed an <mark>inevitable</mark>–part of architecture’s future.</p>
<footer>Andrew Witt, <cite>The Machinic Animal: Autonomic Networks And Behavioral Computation</cite> in <cite>When Is The Digital In Architecture?</cite>, 2017</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>A true <strong>digital literacy</strong>—the ability not only to read but also <strong>write</strong>—appears as the logical technical continuum of the architectural profession, a timely practice.</p>
<p>(We should explore whether such literacy should be extended to other fields than architecture and design, and if the use of graphical <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/062.html">software</a> dispensing from the understanding of computer fundamentals is truly beneficial.)</p>Open Source v Free [Libre]2021-01-07T14:00:00+00:002021-01-07T14:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/066<p><strong>Open source</strong> culture has been long present among software developers, but it has echoes in other areas as well (open science, open data, open government, and so on).</p>
<p>The expression open source is often accompanied by an aura draped in velvet: by opening up the source code (i.e., by making it public), one instantly confers it qualities of “transparency” and “goodwill.”
The code being open, it may be inspected, and even executed and reused if the conditions allow it (reproducible tech stack, permissive licensing).
Bugs can be found and fixed more quickly, software may benefit from the expertise of members of the “community.”</p>
<p><strong>Richard Stallman</strong>, pioneer of the free software movement, applies the brakes to such excess of enthusiasm.
He denotes the major distinction between the expressions “<strong>open source</strong>” and “<strong>free [libre] software</strong>,” which are often confused and used interchangeably.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>
However, they have fundamentally different meanings:<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup></p>
<blockquote>
<p>The two now describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values.
For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, essential respect for the users’ freedom.
<mark>By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only.</mark>
It says that nonfree software is an inferior solution to the practical problem at hand.</p>
<footer>
Richard Stallman, <cite src="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html">Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software</cite>
</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>The cleavage is philosophical, and it is twofold, <strong>ethical</strong> (different <em>values</em> are implied) and <strong>ontological</strong> (the expressions denote different <em>kinds of things</em>).
“Open source” programs are appreciated for their robustness and performance, both which are <strong>practical considerations</strong> which however are often the only ones guiding the development of software.
Free software is nearly always open source (a more or less essential condition to respect the freedoms of the user), but the opposite is not automatically true.
The free software movement carries inalienable values that promote true <strong>freedom</strong>, which may be embodied through open source software, but not only—it is not a <em>sufficient condition</em>.</p>
<p>Applying the “open source” label alone may sound noble at first. However we should examine the implications of such gesture, what it means and what it can actually bring to the table.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>“Free,” in this context, does not mean “free as in beer“ but rather refers to the concept of freedom, as in “free speech.” The term “libre”—used in French for instance—allows for this disambiguation. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>Richard Stallman, <cite src="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html">Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software</cite> <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Standardizing Attention2021-05-21T12:00:00+00:002021-05-21T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/067<p>In his book <em>Pour une écologie de l’attention</em> <em>[In Favor of an Ecology of Attention]</em>, <sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> literature professor Yves Citton notes some important effects of the pervasion of the digital on our regimes of attention:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The digitalization of attention … imposes inevitable <mark>standardazition effects</mark>, due to the fact that <em>a flux of data cannot circulate in a vector unless it submits itself to the parameters and the homogeneization norms defined by its protocol</em>.
In YouTube’s first years of existence, anyone could upload (almost) anything and make it publicly available—as long as they would cut it in slices of ten minutes.
We can communicate any type of writing to anyone in any place of the world—as long as we enter it through a keyboard (rendering the text graphologicly mute) or scan it (which erases any relief from the original paper).
We can transmit any type of music as an mp3 file—as long as we submit to a compression rate that chokes the vivacity of high-quality recordings.
A certain degree of standardization (more or less damageable) is the price to pay to benefit from the ease of transmission offered by its vector.</p>
<footer>Citton, 2014, 107-108</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>The digital appears, in this sens, particularly constraining, since it “pre-parameters” our perception of the real, also limiting the means of acting upon it.
It reduces the possibilities, narrows our imaginary in a set of technical paradigms, which are mostly directed by <strong>logics of calculation</strong> which favour <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/066.html">performance</a> over other criteria (cultural or artistic, for example).</p>
<p>The fact that formats, software, protocols, platforms and more broadly the <strong>digitalization</strong> of our actions are increasingly out of our reach seems to be a massive structural pitfall—especially when it becomes less and less visible, increasingly transparent, “naturalized.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The use of these vectors imposes—in rigidly mechanical ways and no longer only a supplely cultural fashion—the submission to certain protocols which are the conditions of access.
The vectorialist control is exerted at the fundamental level (and often hidden) of the choices of pre-parametring which inherent to the <mark>grammaticalization protocols</mark> used by devices.
Selecting a certain sampling rate (usually conditioned by economic calculations oriented towards market profits) mechanically induces the erasing of certain nuances considered insignificant—by whom? in the name of what? according to which relevance? which sensibilities?</p>
<footer>Citton, 2014, 107-108</footer>
</blockquote>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>All translations are mine. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Post-Experience2021-06-06T16:00:00+00:002021-06-06T16:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/068<p>What is Alessandro Baricco’s “post-experience” in his essay <cite>The Game</cite> (2018)?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is the experience as we have imagined it after moving away from its 20<sup>th</sup> century model.
It is the experience attainable by using the tools of the digital insurrection.
It is experience as a daughter of superficiality.
…
As your son seemed to be doing five gestures at the same time, all badly, all superficially, all in vain, here’s what was really happening: <mark>he was realizing one single gesture, unknown from us, and realizing it magnificently</mark>.
He was using <mark>seeds of experience</mark>—prepared for a long time to acquire the synthetic, ultimate and complete attribute which only seeds possess—, he was crossing them and stacking them to ripen a vibration which would ultimately give him the privilege of a real experience.
<mark>A post-experience.</mark></p>
<footer>
Alessandro Baricco, <cite>The Game</cite>[^translation]
</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Surface becomes the (tiny) heart of experience derived from digital culture: each thing must be reduced to a <strong>monad of experience</strong><sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> (simple, synthetic, ultimate, complete).</p>
<ul>
<li>Wagner’s work <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/067.html">in MP3</a>.</li>
<li>Foucault’s thought summarized in one meme.</li>
<li>Expression of love in a single emoji.</li>
</ul>
<p>Post-experience is “the intelligent version of multitasking,” “using superficiality as a foundation of meaning,” <mark>“the technique of dancing on top of icebergs”</mark>.
It is what the “new elites” of the 21<sup>st</sup> century are capable of; it is what characterizes their particular “<strong>form of intelligence</strong>,” an intelligence that consists of handling the tools quickly and fluently, <em>but without understanding the things being manipulated</em>—merely connecting them in order to produce, in such <strong>motion</strong>, something new; understanding the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/061.html">environment</a> as an instrument of knowledge, but not <em>knowledge</em> itself.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is an intellectual elite of a different kind, vaguely humanist, in which the discipline of studying has been replaced with <mark>the capacity of connecting dots</mark>, where the privilege of knowledge has been dissolved in that action and where effort of thinking in depth has been reversed to the pleasure of thinking quickly.</p>
<footer>Alessandro Baricco</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Reconfiguring, moving, multiplying: the new elites manipulate symbols, but without understanding them.
Just like the ignorant operator in Searle’s Chinese room.</p>
<p>Just like a computer.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Baricco uses the term “seeds of experience,” which is a well-sought metaphor. I prefer borrowing Leibniz’s terminology, the “monad,” to generalize his remark. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Hume’s Passions2021-06-22T18:30:00+00:002021-06-22T18:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/069<p>David Hume is the philosopher of passions.</p>
<p>Nicknamed by some the “philosopher of love” (because of his clear and pleasant style; and because he writes about love and other such exciting things), Hume argues that <strong>sensation</strong> is our primary criterium of truth.
His method is empirical, driven from <strong>experience</strong>: we should therefore listen to our feelings, our passions, since they reveal concrete truths about the world around us (not without a rigorous, although moderate, use of <strong>reason</strong>).</p>
<p>How does love work?
Can we explain its causes with logical arguments without lapsing into cold rationalism?
It is Hume’s skeptical intuition that we can listen to both reason and emotions.</p>
<h2 id="overview">Overview</h2>
<p>In the presentation leading to the French edition of the <cite>Passions</cite>, translator Jean-Pierre Cléro writes on Hume’s dissertations:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The double relation explains my passion of love: the other makes me feel pleasure; I like of for that reason, that is to say I feel pleasure at its address, because of the pleasure it gives me.
To show how <mark>pride</mark> can appear, we must play the relation once more, but from another point of view: the other can like me because of the pleasure I feel myself of the pleasure given by them; my love, because it is the source for them of valorization, hence pride.
<mark>I pride myself in becoming for another the source of their valorization.</mark><sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
<footer>Jean-Pierre Cléro, <cite>Presentation, Dissertation of the Passions</cite></footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Pride; Pleasure; Property; Humility; Power; Anger; Wealth; the Other; the Me; etc…: here’s to a start of a <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/s/hume-passions.html">series</a> of notes on the passions in Hume’s works, echoing <a href="http://blog.sens-public.org/marcellovitalirosati/">Marcello</a>’s series on love and other such things in <cite>Phèdre</cite>.</p>
<p>The quest will be to husk the causes and workings of such passions, which never seem to age across the centuries or millennia.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Freely translated from French by me. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Hume’s Passions: Operations of the Passions2021-06-23T12:00:00+00:002021-06-23T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/070<blockquote>
<p>In order to explain the causes of these passions, we must reflect on certain properties, which, tho’ they have a mighty influence on every <mark>operation</mark>, both of the understanding and passions, are not commonly much insisted on by philosophers.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, §3</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>In his preliminary interrogations on the passions, Hume tries to determine their causes, and more specifically the root <strong>principles</strong> of these causes.
His method, <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/069.html">as a reminder</a>, is that of empiricism, driven from <strong>experience</strong>, simple observation.</p>
<p>He notes three principles describing the workings of the passions:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>association of ideas</strong> (it is natural to jump from one idea to another, given there is something linking the two);</li>
<li><strong>association of resembling emotions</strong> (grief and disappointment are often followed by anger and envy, and even malice, then grief again);</li>
<li><strong>the association between two emotions is even greater when both concur in the same thing</strong> (an angry person will find even more pretexts to justify their irritation before other people).</li>
</ol>
<blockquote>
<p>Thus, a man, who, by any injury from another, is very much discomposed and ruffled in his temper, is apt to find a hundred subjects of hatred, discontent, impatience, fear, and other uneasy passions; especially, if he can discover these subjects in or near the person, who was the object of his first emotion.
Those principles, which forward the transition of ideas, here concur with those, which operate on the passions; <mark>and both, uniting in one action, bestow on the mind a double impulse</mark>.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, §3</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>These chaining effects noted by Hume are simply allowed by <strong>transitivity</strong>: an unpleasant impression carries another similar one, equally unpleasant, as it occurs while passing from cry to anger, hatred, resentment.
This also holds for pleasant emotions: we are more generous when we are already in a good mood, when seeing a person which appears to us as pretty or elegant, and our own good will provides us with even more well-being.</p>
<p>According to Hume, such relations, <strong>pleasant</strong> or <strong>unpleasant</strong>, are tightly linked to equally opposite feelings—<strong>pride</strong> and <strong>humility</strong>—which are fundamental to understand the workings of love.</p>Hume’s Passions: Pride and Humility2021-06-24T11:30:00+00:002021-06-24T11:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/071<blockquote>
<p>The feeling or sentiment of pride is agreeable; of humility, painful.
An agreeable sensation is, therefore, related to the former; a painful, to the latter.
And if we find, after examination, that every object, which produces pride, produces also a separate pleasure; and every object, that causes humility, excites in like manner a separate uneasiness; <mark>we must allow, in that case, that the present theory is fully proved and ascertained</mark>.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section II, §5</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>The relation of causality is evident and immediate: what pleases me flatters my <strong>pride</strong>, what is painful generates <strong>humility</strong>.
Hume’s demonstration is both eloquent and succint: he simply procedes by <strong>sufficient reason</strong>, needing nothing more to validate his conclusion.</p>
<p>This duality is imoprtant, since Hume will always relate to the Self through these two feelings.
How could one understand love without first knowing the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/070.html">workings</a> of the passions, and the nature of these relations?</p>Hume’s Passions: Pride and Property2021-06-25T15:30:00+00:002021-06-25T15:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/072<blockquote>
<p>Whatever we are proud of, must, in some manner, <mark>belong to us</mark>.
It is always <em>our</em> knowledge, <em>our</em> sense, beauty, possessions, family, on which we value ourselves.
Self, which is the object of the passion, must still be related to that quality or circumstance, which causes the passion.
There must be a connection betwixt them …. <mark>Where this connection is wanting, no object can either excite pride or humility</mark>; and the more you weaken the connection, the more you weaken the passion.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section II, §4</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>As seen previously, there are only <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/071.html">two feelings of the Self</a> for Hume: <strong>pride</strong> and <strong>humility</strong>.
The <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/070.html">working</a> of these feelings is simple: the more something pleases us, the more it generates pride (and vice versa for humility).</p>
<p>What is significant, notices Hume, is the <strong>connection</strong> between this pleasant idea and the <strong>Self</strong>; it is always its relation to the self, a relation of <strong>property</strong>.
The less this idea is linked to the Self, the less it effective it will be.</p>
<p>We could not therefore attempt to understand love but through this relation to the Self: something that pleases me (an idea, an object, a person) pleases me precisely because of the pleasure it brings to me (not someone else).</p>Hume’s Passions: Pleasure, Pain and Virtue2021-06-25T13:20:00+00:002021-06-25T13:20:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/073<blockquote>
<p>… it is still evident, that pain and pleasure, if not the sources of moral distinctions, are at least inseparable from them.
A generous and noble character affords a satisfaction even in the survey; and when presented to us, tho’ only in a poem or fable, never fails to charm and delight us.
On the other hand, cruelty and treachery displease from their very nature; nor is it possible ever to reconcile us to these qualities, either in ourselves or others.
Virtue, therefore, produces always a pleasure distinct from the pride or self satisfaction, which attends it: Vice, an uneasiness separate from the humility or remorse.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section II, §4</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Hume’s moral theory seems to go without saying: what pleases us enchants us (the Good); we don’t like what is painful (the Bad).</p>
<p>What pleases us <strong>satisfies</strong> us, it is a pleasure of the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/071.html">Pride</a> (an important feeling in Hume’s philosophy); what we disapprove, of or feel <strong>uneasy</strong> about, we avoid (because what is unpleasant is linked to humility).</p>
<p>Living according to a moral theory that does not please us (for example, accomplish chaste and unpleasant actions merely in the name of a moral “good”) is not viable.
In love, Hume invites us to listen to what pleases our partner, to flatter their pleasure and thus their pride; not to act in the name of an abstract “good,” but rather be guided by what pleases each other.</p>Hume’s Passions: Pleasure and Beauty2021-06-27T16:00:00+00:002021-06-27T16:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/074<blockquote>
<p>Beauty of all kinds gives us a peculiar delight and satisfaction; as deformity produces pain, upon whatever subject it may be placed, and whether surveyed in an animate or inanimate object.</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>It would seem, that the very essence of beauty consists in its power of producing pleasure.
All its effects, therefore, must proceed from this circumstance: And if beauty is so universally the subject of vanity, it is only from its being the cause of pleasure.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section II, §7</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Another evident demonstration from Hume, who proceeds by <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/070.html">observation</a>: beauty simply produces pleasure; no need to rationalize further.</p>
<p>Beauty, in this sense, has no direct explanation: we like or we don’t like (something or someone).
We are born with certain tendencies, we develop some over time, but the pleasure from beauty will always be given from the <strong>senses</strong>.
We cannot do otherwise but listen to what we find beautiful, hence what brings us pleasure.</p>
<p>To like something, finding it beautiful, does not rely on will, on <em>volition</em>, says Hume; it is not something that we chose rationally, but rather something that we <strong>undergo</strong>, like the laws of nature.</p>Hume’s Passions: Will and Rationality2021-06-28T19:00:00+00:002021-06-28T19:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/075<blockquote>
<p>It seems evident, that reason, in a strict sense, as meaning the judgment of truth and falshood, can never, of itself, be any motive to the will, and can have no influence but so far as it touches some passion or affection.
Abstract relations of ideas are <mark>the object of curiosity</mark>, not of volition.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section V, §1</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Just as <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/074.html">beauty</a>, which is simply (and inexplicably) cause of pleasure, will is itself directly linked to feelings, emotions, out of reach from reason.
We cannot <em>will</em> will, says Hume: there must be some sort of passion that makes us willing to want something.
In other words: we want what we like, but we <em>chose not</em> what we like; reason can be of no help here.</p>
<p>On this topic, Hume suddenly becomes more polemical, suggesting that “reason” (in its common accepting), is nothing more than a facade obfuscating other, more moderate, passions:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What is commonly, in a popular sense, called reason, and is so much recommended in moral discourses, <mark>is nothing but a general and a calm passion</mark>, which takes a comprehensive and distant view of its object, and actuates the will, without exciting any sensible emotion.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section V, §2</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>To act in a moderate fashion (even “reasonably”) is therefore not, according to Hume, the consequent of a cold and rational decision: rather, it is the manifestation of an <strong>underlying passion</strong>, less obvious but real nevertheless.</p>
<p>Is every human reaction necessarily passionate, driven by emotions?</p>Hume’s Passions: the Reason’s Funeral2021-06-30T15:20:00+00:002021-06-30T15:20:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/076<p>Hume just tempered the importance of so-called “<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/075.html">reason</a>” in the process of decision-making.
In fact, anything pretending to be “rational” (or “reasonable”) relies on <strong>passions</strong>, only less vivid ones:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The same objects, which recommend themselves to reason in this sense of the word, are also the objects of what we call passion, when they are brought near to us, and acquire some other advantages, either of external situation, or congruity to our internal temper; and by that means, excite a turbulent and sensible emotion.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section V, §3</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>For that matter:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The common error of metaphysicians has lain in ascribing the direction of the will entirely to one of these principles, and supposing the other to have no influence. Men often act knowingly against their interest: It is not therefore the view of the greatest possible good which always influences them.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section V, §4</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>That’s a one-two punch at rationalists: not only are they wrong on the nature of “rational” decision-making (they‘re not—it’s all about passions), Hume shows through a <strong>proof of the absurd</strong> that men, however abled with reason, behave in contradictory fashion.
They therefore violate the most elementary law of reason, <strong>the law of non-contradiction</strong>.</p>
<p>Hume explains this perpetual state of contradiction through <strong>conflictual passions</strong>, which <del>guide</del> command our decisions.</p>
<p>Why does a lover give themself feverishly to the loved one, sometimes at their own expense, without any assurance of receiving in return?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The lover wants the loved one <em>because</em> they are in love.[^raison-lysias]</p>
<footer>Marcello Vitali-Rosati, <a href="http://blog.sens-public.org/marcellovitalirosati/scholia/234b10-c5.html"><cite>In Platonis Phaedrum Scholia: 234b10-c5</cite></a></footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Love is not a feeling of the order of reason.
It is a passion, one among many other contradictory ones, which decisional weight would have been gravely neglected by the rationalists and metaphysicians.</p>
<p>Hume is an <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/069.html">observer</a>.
He draws conclusions as simple as unshakeable from what he sees.
Human beings are deeply irrational.</p>
<p>But this does not mean that love cannot be an affair of self-interest (where the lover is the main interestee, and even the only interestee, even though they give without counting), <strong>on the contrary</strong>; Hume writes on it later.</p>Hume’s Passions: Vanity and Irrationality2021-07-01T14:20:00+00:002021-07-01T14:20:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/077<p>How to explain the inexplicable things that men do, such as make up stories about themselves?
Simply because of the vanity through which they are affected:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We are vain of the surprizing adventures which we have met with, the escapes which we have made, the dangers to which we have been exposed; as well as of our surprising feats of vigour and activity.
Hence the origin of vulgar lying; where men, without any interest, and merely out of vanity, heap up a number of extraordinary events, which are either the fictions of their brain; or, if true, have no connexion with themselves.
Their fruitful invention supplies them with a variety of adventures; and where that talent is wanting, <mark>they appropriate such as belong to others, in order to gratify their vanity</mark>: For betwixt that passion, and the sentiment of pleasure, there is always a close connexion.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section II, §7</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Why make up stories?
Human beings are profoundly irrational, Hume has shown it.</p>
<p>By wanting to make themselves interesting, some men attempt to tie to themselves, through a relation of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/072.html">property</a>, events that would confer them greater importance, because prone to more attention from other people (and in particular those they find desirable).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But <mark><em>property</em></mark>, as it gives us the fullest power and authority over any object, is the relation, which has the greatest influence on these passions.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section II, §9</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>What brings us pleasure suddenly appears much more reasonable.</p>
<p>It is therefore merely in order to “<strong>flatter their pride</strong>”—feeling of pleasure by excellence according to Hume—that men behave in such vain, misleading ways—and surely against reason.</p>
<p>It is very often the case in love—since the object of pride (thus pleasure) is, precisely, the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/071.html">Self</a>.</p>Hume’s Passions: Compassion and Aversion2021-07-02T16:00:00+00:002021-07-02T16:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/078<blockquote>
<p><mark>Compassion</mark> of tenderness or friendship; and <mark>envy</mark> is naturally accompanied with anger or ill-will.
To desire the happiness of another, from whatever motive, is a good preparative to affection: And to delight in another’s misery almost unavoidably begets aversion towards him.</p>
<p>… A <mark>partner</mark> is a natural object of friendship; a rival of enmity.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section III, §5</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Hume notes “natural laws” of human begins.
He often states the obvious, sometimes nearing tautologies: we give affection to the people we like and we push away the people we dislike.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As hatred produces a desire of the misery, and an aversion to the happiness of the person hated. These opposite desires seem to be originally and primarily conjoined with the passions of love and hatred.
<mark>It is a constitution of nature, of which we can give no farther explication.</mark></p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section III, §3</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>These observations are important for the sequel of the study on feelings: humans naturally behave this way, in a more or less inexplicable and <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/077.html">irrational</a> fashion; they <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/075.html">do not decide</a> what pleases them, they directly feel the effects of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/074.html">beauty</a> (and deformity).</p>
<p>The takeaway for the upcoming of the series is that we naturally demonstrate <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/079.html">compassion</a> towards our <strong>partners</strong> (people we surround ourselves of because we find them desirable, pleasant); inversely, we demonstrate aversion towards our <strong>rivals</strong> (people who covet the same things as us and who are too close to our liking, which causes an unpleasant feeling).</p>Hume’s Passions: Compassion and Egocentricity2021-07-03T18:00:00+00:002021-07-03T18:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/079<blockquote>
<p>Compassion frequently arises, where there is no preceding esteem or friendship; and compassion is an uneasiness in the sufferings of another. It seems to spring from the intimate and strong conception of his sufferings; and our imagination proceeds by degrees, from the lively idea, to <mark>the real feeling</mark> of another’s misery.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section III, §4</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Compassion is not so much a question of empathy, but rather a personal matter, in respect to the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/069.html">Self</a>: the unpleasant feeling of someone else’s pain as experienced by oneself, in relation to oneself.</p>
<p>Compassion would therefore be, according to Hume, a mechanism which allows stopping this suffering transferred on <strong>oneself</strong> (rather than bring help to someone else by <em>goodwill</em> or <em>kindness</em>).
If we cannot help but feel bad about someone else’s misery, one may attempt to help them in order to stop this unpleasant feeling inside themself.</p>
<p>Demonstrating compassion being a virtuous act, it is first and foremost for themself that one accomplishes such gesture, to make themself feel good; secondly, it flatters their <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/071.html">pride</a>, because it brings others’ attention on us and therefore their esteem.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, compassion simply appears to be a matter of <strong>personal satisfaction</strong>—it is what Hume attempts to make us realize.
There is kindness only but for one’s own ends; to give oneself to the loved one is merely a pretext for the lover to gain even more pleasure (and which will eventually generate jealousy, as we will see).</p>Hume’s Passions: the Amorous Passion2021-07-04T14:30:00+00:002021-07-04T14:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/080<p>Hume writes about the composition of the amorous passion, at last:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The amorous passion is usually compounded of complacency in <mark>beauty</mark>, a <mark>bodily appetite</mark>, and <mark>friendship or affection</mark>.
The close relation of these sentiments is very obvious, as well as their origin from each other, by means of that relation.
Were there no other phaenomenon to reconcile as to the present theory, this alone, methinks, were sufficient.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section III, §7</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Once again, Hume executes his demonstration through <strong>sufficient reason</strong>.
Following Ockham’s razor, given two satisfying explanations, he will always prefer the simplest and most evident one.</p>
<p>(Hume is not totally against the precepts of rationalism; he is just pragmatic enough to use a fair amount of reason—never at the expense of feelings.)</p>
<p><strong>Similar</strong> sensations, the pleasant ones for instance, <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/070.html">produce one another</a>, by association.</p>
<p>Hume notes that the pleasure of <strong>affection</strong> is accompanied by that of <strong>touch</strong>, especially when there is <strong>beauty</strong> (or <em>necessarily</em> when there is beauty?).</p>
<p>Is there an <em>order of causality</em> between these three elements?
Beauty first, bodily envy after, and then affection, or does affection cause the desire of touching?
Hume does not go that far, simply noticing that the amorous passion operates through this main triad of association, of mutual reinforcement.
Hugging allows demonstrating affection, or simply to respond to the “calling of the skin,”<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> or even to just move closer to what is beautiful.</p>
<p>Does the absence of one of these elements leave a hole in the passion?
Is a passion without the carnal component, or even a “platonical” one, doomed to inferiority in comparison to a bodily one?
Hume always invites us to listen to our <strong>senses</strong>; and the sense of touching is a pleasant one, it contributes to the amorous passion, we couldn’t neglect it—especially from a philosophical point of view.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>On this expression (freely translated from <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/080.html">French</a>), see Roland Barthe’s <cite>A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments</cite> (1977) Paris, Seuil, p. 81. (Thanks to Julia for the detailed reference.) <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Hume’s Passions: Sources of Pride2021-07-05T13:00:00+00:002021-07-05T13:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/081<p>Before diving into dark feelings such as envy and jealousy (terrifying facets of love), we insist on one of the most important sources of pride: property.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Men are vain of the beauty either of <em>their</em> country, or <em>their</em> county, or even of <em>their</em> parish.
Here the idea of beauty plainly produces a pleasure.
This pleasure is related to pride.
<mark>The object or cause of this pleasure is, by the supposition, related to self, the object of pride.</mark>
By this double relation of sentiments and ideas, a transition is made from one to the other.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section II, §8</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Things are merely important <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/072.html">in relation to the Self</a>; the importance attributed to them is transferred by simple <strong>association</strong> (this is how the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/071.html">passions</a> operate, through association).</p>
<p>That is the idea of <strong>property</strong>: what is linked to the Self therefore belongs to it, in some respects; and property—it is obvious to Hume—is <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/077.html">the most manifest source of pride</a>.</p>
<p>The problem with this source of pleasant passion (property) is that when it is threatened, it produces an opposite, unpleasant feeling: <strong>jealousy</strong>.</p>Hume’s Passions: the Object of Love2021-07-06T14:45:00+00:002021-07-06T14:45:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/082<p>Hume insists: there are fundamentally but two feelings of the Self: <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/072.html">pride and humility</a>.
The former involves what is pleasant, the latter what is unpleasant.</p>
<p>But then, how does one explain the amorous passion, which consists of the abandonment, head over heels, to someone else?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In running over all the causes, which produce the passion of pride or that of humility; it would readily occur, that the same circumstance, if transferred from ourself to another person, <mark>would render him the object of love or hatred, esteem or contempt</mark>.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section III, §1</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>At last, the emergence of love: passion when it no longer refers to the Self, but to the other.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As the immediate <em>object</em> of pride and humility is self or that identical person, of whose thoughts, actions, and sensations we are intimately conscious; so the <em>object</em> of love and hatred is some <mark>other person</mark>, of whose thoughts, actions, and sensations we are not conscious.
<del>This is sufficiently evident from experience.</del>
Our love and hatred are always directed to some sensible being external to us; and when we talk of <em>self-love</em>, ’tis not in a proper sense, nor has the sensation it produces any thing in common with that tender emotion, which is excited by a friend or mistress.
’Tis the same case with hatred.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section I</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Love is therefore a particular manifestation of pride: this pride being found in the other, since it causes happiness in the loved one (through affection), this has the effect of flattering the pride of the lover.</p>
<p>This premise is extremely important to apprehend feelings of hatred, envy, and jealousy.</p>Hume’s Passions: Causes of Love2021-07-08T14:00:00+00:002021-07-08T14:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/083<blockquote>
<p>The virtues, talents, accomplishments, and possessions of others make us love and esteem them: Because these objects excite a pleasant sensation, which is related to love; and having also a relation or connexion with the person, this union of ideas forwards the union of sentiments, according to the foregoing reasoning.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section IV, §2</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Hume summarizes his principle of association of ideas (<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/070.html">and so the passions operate</a>): what is pleasant causes pleasure, and it is through the relation to the Self (of belonging, of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/072.html">property</a> that such thing becomes even more pleasant.</p>
<p>Virtue naturally pleases us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A generous and noble character affords a satisfaction even in the survey; and when presented to us, tho’ only in a poem or fable, never fails to charm and delight us.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section II, §6</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>The talents and qualities, especially when less common, have even greater value in a person we seek a relationship with.
Objects considered as beautiful, yet onerous, bring certain benefits when at the disposal of the person to which they belong (for instance, this person may decide to wear elegant clothes when they wish, even emphasize on some of their physical perfections).</p>
<p>These are not <em>causes</em> per se; but since these pleasant things related to the person whom we seek a relationship with, they participate to the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/080.html">amorous passion</a>.</p>Hume’s Passions: the Paradox of Little Flaws2021-07-10T17:20:00+00:002021-07-10T17:20:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/084<blockquote>
<p>When a person is once heartily in love, the little faults and caprices of his mistress, the jealousies and quarrels, to which that <mark>commerce</mark> is so subject; however unpleasant they be, and rather connected with anger and hatred; are yet found, in many instances, to give <mark>additional force to the prevailing passion</mark>.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section VI, §1</footer>
</blockquote>
<h2 id="the-word-commerce">The word “commerce”</h2>
<p>Does the appearance of the word “<strong>commerce</strong>” give away Hume’s conception of love as an <em>economic</em>, <em>transactional</em> matter?
This would be supported by Lysias’s words in Plato’s Phèdre, as well as the mathematical calculation which Marcello alludes.</p>
<h2 id="the-paradox">The paradox</h2>
<p>The flaws of the lover (or the loved one) would allow them to be loved even more, since those flaws increase the “dominant passion” (<em>i.e.</em> the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/080.html">amorous passion</a>).
Surprising, since Hume suggests that the association of similar ideas and impressions tends to reinforce these mutually, not the opposite ones.
But in this case, yes.</p>
<p>Why?</p>
<p>Do we naturally prefer things that are not perfectly flawless, thus with accidental imperfections, textures of randomness, organic and living traits?</p>
<p>Or is it to preserve one’s own <strong>pride</strong>?</p>
<p>Hypothesis in the light of feelings described in Hume’s works: thanks to flaws found in the other, one can love them without fearing for their own <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/071.html">pride</a>.
In the other’s company, the lover can lower their guard and behave serenely, fearing not to be <em>negatively judged</em> in regards to their flaws (to be liked by someone else, and even more to be seen with this person in public before the eyes of other people, also contributes to self’s pride).</p>
<p>This is however absolute speculation: Hume <strong>notices</strong> the paradox, but does not <em>explain</em> it.</p>Hume’s Passions: More Vanity2021-07-11T16:00:00+00:002021-07-11T16:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/085<blockquote>
<p><mark>Every thing, belonging to a vain man, is the best that is any where to be found.</mark>
His houses, equipage, furniture, cloaths, horses, hounds, excel all others in his conceit; and it is easy to observe, that, from the least advantage in any of these, he draws a new subject of pride and vanity.
<del>His wine, if you will believe him, has a finer flavour than any other; his cookery is more exquisite; his table more orderly; his servants more expert; the air, in which he lives, more healthful; the soil, which he cultivates, more fertile; his fruits ripen earlier, and in greater perfection: Such a thing is remarkable for it’s novelty; such another for it’s antiquity: This is the workmanship of a famous artist; that belonged once to such a prince or great man.</del>
…
As every new instance is a new argument, <mark>and as the instances are here without number; it would seem, that this theory is sufficiently confirmed by experience</mark>.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section II, §9</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>The argument reflects Hume’s philosophical style, <strong>empiricism</strong> (one draws the conclusion from what one sees, from true examples).
The end of the passage gains strength from an apparent <strong>infinite regression</strong> (“the instances are here without number”); the weight of such argument makes it difficult not to consent.</p>
<p>To be a lover by mere pride (<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/vanity.html">vanity</a>) would mean neglecting the other for the sake of one’s own pride (because being a lover means finding their pride <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/077.html">in someone else</a>, says Hume).
In the specific case of love by pure vanity, the loss of the “loved one” becomes unavoidable, since the amorous pleasure exists not for the happiness of each of the parties, but for the pride of a single one.
“Loss” because the loved one is no longer object of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/081.html">property</a>—not as in a <em>material possession</em> but rather in a <strong>relational</strong> sense (the relation from the loved one to the Self is broken).
This “loss” will cause anger, sadness, envy—unpleasant sensations that may come as a surprise in contrast to the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/080.html">amorous passion</a>, which could be understood naively as <em>well meaning</em> and <em>empathic</em> (<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/079.html">it is not the case</a>.</p>
<p>In vain love, the loss of the loved one (in whom is found the pride of the lover) causes such anger, which Hume studies later on.</p>
<p>Is Hume warning us against a <strong>trap</strong> in love <em>(that of being a lover by pride, by vanity)</em>, thus suggesting a “good way” of being a lover, in a… non-vain fashion?</p>Hume’s Passions: Animals2021-07-11T16:00:00+00:002021-07-11T16:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/086<p>Hume has a biological, evolutionist intuition on the nature of passions in human beings:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… we must first shew the correspondence of <em>passions</em> in men and animals, and afterwards compare the <em>causes</em>, which produce these passions.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part I, section XII</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>He operates by relying on similarity, through resemblance:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The <em>causes</em> of these passions are likewise much the same in beasts as in us, making a just allowance for our superior knowledge and understanding.
Thus animals have little or no sense of virtue or vice; they quickly lose sight of the relations of blood; and are incapable of that of right and property; For which reason the causes of their pride and humility must lie solely in the body, and can never be plac’d either in the mind or external objects.
<mark>But so far as regards the body, the same qualities cause pride in the animal as in the human kind</mark>; and ’tis on beauty, strength, swiftness or some other useful or agreeable quality that this passion is always founded.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part I, section XII</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Hume has already discussed the importance of the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/080.html">bodily component</a> of the amorous passion.
The English Philosopher does not hesitate to bring up the filiation between the other animals and the human kind to support his observation—human beings, which are fundamentally animals, are necessarily because materially driven to react to the pleasant and unpleasant sensations of their body, above all rationality (Hume has already demonstrated how human beings act in a <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/076.html">profoundly irrational</a> fashion).</p>
<p>How such impulses are, according to Hume, counterbalanced by <strong>culturally acquired</strong> pleasures (through the richness of the rites and training of the senses) or <strong>morally conditioned</strong> ones (we naturally tend to prefer what is <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/083.html">virtuous</a>), remains unresolved.</p>Hume’s Passions: Approval and Contradiction2021-07-14T18:00:00+00:002021-07-14T18:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/087<blockquote>
<p>The uneasiness and satisfaction, produced in the spectator, are essential to vice and virtue.
<mark>To approve of a character, is to feel a delight upon its appearance.</mark>
To disapprove of it, is to be sensible of an uneasiness.
The pain and pleasure, therefore, being, in a manner, the primary source of blame or praise, must also be the causes of all their effects; and consequently, the causes of pride and humility, which are the unavoidable attendants of that distinction.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section II, §8</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>To agree or to disagree: two ways of naturally provoking the passions, the positive and the negative ones, satisfaction and uneasiness—thus, <strong>pride</strong> and <strong>humility</strong>, the two <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/071.html">fundamental passions</a>.</p>
<p>Except when in the company of a philosopher who takes (vain?) pleasure in pure spirit of contradiction, it is advised to butter up the other in order to generate pleasure, because everyone naturally takes pleasure in receiving approval from others (even philosophers), to “<strong>be right</strong>” (maybe <em>especially</em> philosophers<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>).</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Who other than philosophers are more flattered of “being right”? <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Hume’s Passions: Judgements and Opinions I2021-07-15T14:00:00+00:002021-07-15T14:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/088<blockquote>
<p>Men always consider the <mark>sentiments of others</mark> in their judgment of themselves.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section II, §11</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Hume states that we exist through the eyes (and opinions) of others.
He notes that such foundation of our own pride is rather fragile:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Our opinions of all kinds are strongly affected by society and sympathy, and it is almost impossible for us to support any principle or sentiment, against the universal consent of every one, with whom we have any friendship or correspondence. But of all our opinions, those, which we form in our own favour; however lofty or presuming; are, at bottom, <mark>the frailest, and the most easily shaken</mark> by the contradiction and opposition of others.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section II, §10</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>We naturally seek others’ <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/087.html">approval</a>, which pleases us; their disapproval offends us.
This is even more true with people with a stronger connection:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We receive a much greater satisfaction from the approbation of those, whom we ourselves esteem and approve of, than of those, whom we contemn and despise.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section II, §10</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>The opinions and feelings of people close to us counts for much, much more.
What the lover says to the loved one (on their qualities and their faults) will have an immense impact on the perception of the loved one of themself.</p>
<p>Hume therefore suggests that we not take lightly the remarks made to the cherished ones: they will be equally flattered by a pleasant remark (to receive a compliment, praise) as offended by a humiliating contradiction (to have an ugly trait, a flaw, highlighted).</p>Hume’s Passions: Judgements and Opinions II2021-07-16T15:00:00+00:002021-07-16T15:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/089<p>Human beings constantly seek to improve the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/088.html">opinion</a> of themselves, to flatter their own pride.
A natural and efficient way consists in comparing oneself to others (to the extent of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/077.html">making up stories</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><mark>Comparison is in every case a sure method of augmenting our esteem of any thing.</mark>
A rich man feels the felicity of his condition better by opposing it to that of a beggar.
But there is a peculiar advantage in power, by the contrast, which is, in a manner, presented to us, betwixt ourselves and the person we command.
The comparison is obvious and natural: The imagination finds it in the very subject: The passage of the thought to its conception is smooth and easy.
And that this circumstance has a considerable effect in augmenting its influence, will appear afterwards in examining the nature of <em>malice</em> and <em>envy</em>.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part I, section X</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Among the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/081.html">causes</a> of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/071.html">pride</a>, that of wealth (<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/072.html">property</a>) seems to naturally have the most impact—<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/085.html">vanities</a> in support.</p>
<p><strong>Comparison</strong> is one of Hume’s favourite epistemological methods: the relations between ideas are almost always born out of resemblance and contiguity (as in the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/086.html">animal</a> component of humans).
The philosopher would not miss out on using it, especially since it speaks so clearly to <strong>common sense</strong>.</p>
<p>Even in <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/080.html">love</a>, humans (who make for <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/065.html">little rationality</a>) keep making comparisons; it is where some of the most terrifying passions emerge, Hume underlines, those of <em>envy</em> and <em>malice</em>—but let’s not discuss those just now.
We’ll recall that once again, it is being seen through the eyes of others which counts the most, and that one behaves not by pure <em>kindness</em>, but always for their <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/079.html">own esteem</a>.</p>Hume’s Passions: Judgments and Opinions III2021-07-17T17:00:00+00:002021-07-17T17:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/090<p>Do we love by <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/vanity.html">#vanity</a>, for the favourable <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/089.html">opinion</a> of the other?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Praise never gives us much pleasure, <mark>unless it concur with our own opinion</mark>, and extol us for those qualities, in which we chiefly excel.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section II, §10</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Others’ <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/087.html">agreement</a>, already a source of pride, causes even more pleasure when coming from a desired partner, thus becoming an additional reason why both parties would make a relationship last.</p>
<p>To seek the affection from someone who recognizes and praises one’s own qualities: it is particularly true in love, in which the ultimate—however impossible—objective is the eternal union:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When esteem is obtained after a long and intimate acquaintance, it gratifies our vanity in a peculiar manner.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section II, §10</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>By <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/080.html">amorous passion</a>, indeed (different passions reinforce each other when they concur to the same object); and thus by <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/pride.html">#pride</a>, for the relation of pleasure it brings to the Self.</p>Hume’s Passions: the Four Possible Affections2021-07-18T16:00:00+00:002021-07-18T16:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/091<blockquote>
<p>Myself am the proper object of <mark>pride</mark> or <mark>humility</mark>; the other person of <mark>love</mark> or <mark>hatred</mark>.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section II</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Hume maintained that there were only two fundamental passions of the Self: <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/071.html">pride and humility</a>.
He explains that <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/082.html">the object of love</a> is not the Self, but the other, because the (amorous) passion must be caused by something else, which the Self alone cannot.</p>
<p>When an object, a person leaves us not indifferent, Hume maintains that there are only four possibilities: either such thing causes <em>in ourselves</em> pleasure or uneasiness; either such thing can be found <em>in the other</em>, causing similar and corresponding feelings.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… pride and love are agreeable passions; hatred and humility uneasy.
<del>This similitude of sensation betwixt pride and love, and that betwixt humility and hatred form a new connexion, and may be consider’d as the other two sides of the square.</del>
Upon the whole, pride is connected with humility, love with hatred, by their objects or ideas: Pride with love, humility with hatred, by their sensations or impressions.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section II</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>What is pleasant and related to self makes one <strong>proud</strong>, what is related to someone else means <strong>love</strong>, hence the following table:</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Agreeable</th>
<th>Uneasy</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Self</td>
<td>Pride</td>
<td>Humility</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Other</td>
<td>Love</td>
<td>Hatred</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>How is <strong>love</strong> (directed at others) compatible with <strong>pride</strong> (directed at self)?
Hume suggests a series of experiements in order to confirm his “<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/s/hume-passions.html">rigorous system on the passions</a>” and resolve some contradictions which seem to emerge from it.</p>Hume’s Passions: System I2021-07-21T18:55:00+00:002021-07-21T18:55:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/092<p>Hume maintains a system of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/091.html">four passions</a>: two agreeable, two uneasy, of which the object is either self or the other.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That I may be sure I am not mistaken in this experiment, I remove first one relation; then another; and find, that each removal destroys the passion, and leaves the object perfectly indifferent.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section II</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>A compliment naturally flatters one’s pride.
Given to someone else, it is not a prideful passion, but an amourous passion, at least of kindness, that is awakened.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But I am not content with this. I make a still farther trial; and instead of removing the relation, I only change it for one of a different kind.
I suppose the virtue to belong <mark>to my companion</mark>, not to myself; and observe what follows from this alteration.
I immediately perceive the affections to wheel about, and leaving pride, where there is only one relation, <em>viz.</em> of impressions, fall to the side of love, where they are attracted by a double relation of impressions and ideas.
By repeating the same experiment, in changing anew the relation of ideas, I bring the affections back to pride; and by a new repetition I again place them at love or kindness.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Kindness is therefore possible, when a certain virtue or a quality is moved towards someone else (someone we admire, or endear).
Love can be compatible with pride, and pride with kindness (unlike <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/079.html">what has been stated previously</a>.</p>Hume’s Passions: the Circle of Passions2021-07-22T21:00:00+00:002021-07-22T21:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/093<blockquote>
<p>Being fully convinc’d of the influence of this relation, I try the effects of the other; and by changing virtue for vice, convert the pleasant impression, which arises from the former, into the disagreeable one, which proceeds from the latter.
The effect still answers expectation.
Vice, when plac’d on another, excites, by means of its double relations, the passion of hatred, instead of love, which for the same reason arises from virtue.
To continue the experiment, I change anew the relation of ideas, and suppose the vice to belong to myself.
What follows?
What is usual. A subsequent change of the passion from hatred to humility.
This humility I convert into pride by a new change of the impression; and find after all that I have compleated the round, and have by these changes brought back the passion to that very situation, in which I first found it.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section II</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Hume’s argument, written in the <strong>geometric style</strong> (it’s a circle), is seducing: it moves from one passion to the other, by <strong>transitivity</strong>, in order to show the completeness and the unicity of Hume’s [system](https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/092.html on the passions.</p>
<p><figure class="Figure invertable">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/093/hume-cercle-passions-invertable.en.jpg"
alt="What is virtuous is agreeable, causing either the passions of pride (in the self) or of love (in others); what is uneasy is vicious, causing humility in self and hatred in others. The passage of one passion to another is natural to Hume."
title="Hume’s circle of passions"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Hume’s circle of passions</strong>
<p>
What is virtuous is agreeable, causing either the passions of pride (in the self) or of love (in others); what is uneasy is vicious, causing humility in self and hatred in others. The passage of one passion to another is natural to Hume.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>He thus gives the impression of having gone through (or around) the possible passions and that his system works without a fault—in part maybe because it is so <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/simplicity.html">simple</a>, whereas <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/complexity.html">complexity</a> is naturally error-prone.</p>Hume’s Passions: Experiments on the System2021-07-23T14:00:00+00:002021-07-23T14:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/094<blockquote>
<p>To give greater authority to these experiments, let us change the situation of affairs as much as possible, and place the passions and objects in all the different positions, of which they are susceptible. Let us suppose, beside the relations above-mention’d, that the person, along with whom I make all these experiments, is closely connected with me either by blood or friendship. He is, we shall suppose, my son or brother, or is united to me by a long and familiar acquaintance. Let us next suppose, that the cause of the passion acquires a double relation of impressions and ideas to this person; and let us see what the effects are of all these complicated attractions and relations.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section II</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>An object or a person which causes an impression of <strong>double relation</strong> (from self to others and from others to self) necessarily brings a passion—one of the four passions of Hume’s <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/092.html">system</a>, <em>i.e.</em> pride, humility, love and hatred.
Hume demonstrates it further along, when the causal chain of this double relation is broken, the passion disappears, even if the two objects continue to exist.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The person has a relation of ideas to myself, according to the supposition; the passion, of which he is the object, by being either agreeable or uneasy, has a relation of impressions to <mark>pride</mark> or <mark>humility</mark>.
’Tis evident, then, that one of these passions must arise from the <mark>love</mark> or <mark>hatred</mark>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hume has already shown it: the passions are mutually caused <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/070.html">by resemblance</a>, and the transition between the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/093.html">four passions</a> comes easily.
These passions arise merely in the case of a double relation, when the person or the object has some kind of connection to the self—especially if this connection is <strong>intimate</strong>, such as a close parent or an affectionate acquaintance.</p>
<p>Hume, by principle of sufficient reason, is satisfied by his reasoning, hence the partial conclusion of this experiment:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Nothing causes greater vanity than any shining quality in our relations; as nothing mortifies us more than their vice or infamy.
This exact conformity of experience to our reasoning is a convincing proof of the solidity of that hypothesis, upon which we reason.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section II</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>The passage from <strong>love</strong> to <strong>hatred</strong>, such strong and opposite passions, is incredibly trivial in Hume’s system.
The takeaway is that passions may be particularly labile<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>, depending on whether one faces an agreeable quality, a virtue, or an uneasy fault, a vice.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Labile: they change easily. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Hume’s Passions: Overfow2021-07-24T12:00:00+00:002021-07-24T12:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/095<blockquote>
<p>If a double relation, therefore, of impressions and ideas is able to produce a transition from one to the other, much more an identity of impressions with a relation of ideas.
Accordingly we find, that when we either love or hate any person, <mark>the passions seldom continue within their first bounds</mark>; but extend themselves towards all the contiguous objects, and comprehend the friends and relations of him we love or hate.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For instance:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Nothing is more natural than to bear a kindness to one brother on account of our friendship for another, without any farther examination of his character. A quarrel with one person gives us a hatred for the whole family, tho’ entirely innocent of that, which displeases us.
Instances of this kind are everywhere to be met with.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section II</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>“Instances of this kind are everywhere to be met with”: again, a regression to the infinite, in Hume’s favourite argumentative style.
Such situations happen so frequently in everyday life, Hume knows that everyone will see oneself in them: the passions often <strong>overflow</strong> from their main object (<strong>compassion</strong> spreads around the loved one, <strong>aversion</strong> contaminates the surroundings of a despised person).</p>
<p>This observation on the passions reveals one thing: they tend to go out of bounds.
<em><a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/076.html">Reason</a> has no <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/075.html">grip</a> on the passions</em> (or so little).
The passions, by how they <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/070.html">operate</a>, have a much wider impact on one’s temperament and on their kindness towards others (a chef in anger will blame without shame his cooks for faults they did not commit, simply by extension of the unpleasant passion).</p>
<p>The passions have no limits, or these cannot be observed by a reasonable mind.</p>Hume’s Passions: Causes of Hatred2021-07-26T15:30:00+00:002021-07-26T15:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/096<blockquote>
<p>Besides we may consider, that when we receive harm from any person, we are apt to imagine him criminal, and ’tis with extreme difficulty we allow of his justice and innocence.
This is a clear proof, that, independent of the opinion of iniquity, <mark>any harm or uneasiness has a natural tendency to excite our hatred</mark>, and that afterwards we seek for reasons upon which we may <mark>justify and establish the passion</mark>.
Here the idea of injury produces not the passion, but arises from it.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section III</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Fine observation on the part of Hume: hatred does not come from opinion, but vice versa.
Worse: a person affected by such passion yet summons reasons to justify it, even <strong>accuse</strong> another who could be held responsible for the harm they have received.</p>
<p>The passions, more or less <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/085.html">exaggerated</a>, tend to invoke rational explanations.
To be oneself the cause of one’s own humility intensifies the painful aspect of the sensation (I have only myself to blame for my failure in school, my clumsiness in society, my misfortune in relationships); but if the cause is external (a natural disaster, an economic crisis, or simply another person), the force of the passion is diminished, since it can be blamed on something else, someone else.</p>
<p>It is once again an argument in favour of the <strong>primacy of the passions</strong>: an unpleasant passion makes one justify it, <strong>after the fact</strong> (which is not surprising, given that Hume has stated his position on the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/075.html">irrational</a> character of human beings).</p>
<p>Reason is a slave to the passions.</p>Hume’s Passions: the Importance of Intentions2021-07-29T16:00:00+00:002021-07-29T16:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/097<blockquote>
<p>But then I ask, if <mark>the removal of design</mark> be able entirely to remove the passion of love and hatred?
Experience, I am sure, informs us of the contrary, nor is there any thing more certain, than that men often fall into a violent anger for injuries, which they themselves must own to be entirely involuntary and accidental.
This emotion, indeed, cannot be of long continuance; but still is sufficient to shew, that there is a natural connexion betwixt uneasiness and anger, and that the relation of impressions will operate upon a very small relation of ideas.
But when the violence of the impression is once a little abated, the defect of the relation begins to be better felt; and as the character of a person is no wise interested in such injuries as are casual and involuntary, it seldom happens that on their account, we entertain a lasting enmity.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section III</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Hume proceeds by <strong>deduction</strong>: what happens if one suppresses the intention from the cause of the passion?</p>
<p>As seen previously, human beings constantly attempt to <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/076.html">rationalize</a> their feelings (even though <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/075.html">will</a> falls short in controlling them), to make others feel guilty for their <strong>unfortunate passions</strong> (even accidental and involuntary ones).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The removal of the intention, removes the mortification in the one case, and vanity in the other; and must of course cause <mark>a remarkable diminution</mark> in the passions of love and hatred.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Can one blame a child for doing a wrong by ignorance, by inexperience?
Once events have passed, the child will be forgiven.
It is only when human beings act out of pure malice, with an actually mean intention, that hatred towards someone else could go on; otherwise, it will simply fade away.</p>Hume’s Passions: Love, Despise and Annoyance2021-07-31T11:50:00+00:002021-07-31T11:50:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/098<blockquote>
<p>Proud men are most shock’d with contempt, tho’ they do not most readily assent to it; but ’tis because of the opposition betwixt the passion, which is natural to them, and that receiv’d by sympathy.
<mark>A violent lover in like manner is very much displeas’d when you blame and condemn his love</mark>; tho’ tis evident your opposition can have no influence, but by the hold it takes of himself, and by his sympathy with you.
If he despises you, or perceives you are in jest, whatever you say has no effect upon him.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part I, section XI</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>In this passage, Hume uses the example of a person <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/085.html">proudly</a> in love which is undergoing the supreme <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/087.html">annoyance</a>: the denial of their passion.</p>
<p>Here, Hume discuses <strong>despise</strong>, a particular manifestation of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/097.html">hatred</a>.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/093.html">transition</a> from love to hatred occurs easily, naturally in Hume’s <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/092.html">system</a>: the (pleasant) passion of love suddenly transforms itself into the (unpleasant) passion of humility, since the object of the amorous passion (the other) no longer relates to the self.
Since the cause of such harmful feeling is another person (the loved one is refusing their love), the feeling of humility slips towards hatred (<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/096.html">the angry need someone to blame</a>).</p>
<p>However, the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/089.html">opinion</a> of a despised person (or even someone laughing at us) will be of no importance to the annoyed lover.
To talk with the annoyed lover, one must:</p>
<ol>
<li>talk to them seriously;</li>
<li>be nice to them.</li>
</ol>
<p>Otherwise, the person affected by the passion will not be receptive.</p>Hume’s Passions: Jealousy2021-08-02T14:30:00+00:002021-08-02T14:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/099<blockquote>
<p>Envy arises from a superiority in others; but it is observable, that it is not the great disproportion betwixt us, which excites that passion, but on the contrary, <mark>our proximity</mark>.
A great disproportion cuts off the relation of the ideas, and either keeps us from comparing ourselves with what is remote from us, or diminishes the <mark>effects of the comparison</mark>.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section IV, §5</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>It is not the sole superiority of others that causes envy, notes Hume, but one’s <strong>proximity</strong> with those people.
It can also be <strong>in relation to the self</strong>: both parties covet the same thing, the same object, the same person, by <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/072.html">property</a>.
How may this thing slip away from being related to the <em>self</em> to <em>someone else</em>?</p>
<p>One compares themself to others that <strong>resemble</strong> them.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A poet is not apt to envy a philosopher or a poet of a different kind, of a different nation, or of a different age.
All these differences, if they do not prevent, at least weaken the comparison, and consequently the passion.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>An accountant may have an impressive bank account, more than that of a poet or a philosopher, they are people of different kinds, so remote from each other that the poet or the philosopher will experience no great envy towards the accountant.</p>
<p>However, two poets or two philosophers with similar status risk in being much more jealous from each other, because of their <strong>proximity</strong>.
Superiority causes the passion of envy only in a person close to oneself, which can be <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/089.html">compared to</a> (a risky operation, because of its <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/088.html">fragility</a>).</p>Hume’s Passions: the Force of Absence2021-08-03T14:30:00+00:002021-08-03T14:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/100<blockquote>
<p>Rochefoucault has very well remarked, that <mark>absence</mark> destroys weak passions, but encreases strong; as the wind extinguishes a candle, but blows up a fire.
Long absence naturally weakens our idea, and diminishes the passion: But where the passion is so strong and lively as to support itself, the uneasiness, arising from absence, encreases the passion, and gives it new force and influence.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>Dissertations of the Passions</cite>, section VI, §7</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Hume notes that absence may have two opposite effects, depending on the intensity of the passion: it may, with the passage of time, <strong>erase</strong> a moderate passion, or <strong>increase</strong> an intense passion<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>.</p>
<p>The second case presents an interest in particular: the separation of two <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/080.html">lovers</a> brings an increase of intensity to the passion, despite the “uneasiness” caused by such absence.
We imagine that the reunion is pleasant, but Hume goes further: this uneasiness brings “<strong>new force and influence</strong>.”
What does he mean by that?
What reasons can explain this?
Hume gives no explanation, contempt with his mere <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/069.html">observations</a>.</p>
<p>We can deduct that there is a <strong>good form of uneasiness</strong>: uneasiness which, during an absence, would allow, at the time of the reunion, increasing an already strong affection.</p>
<p>It is therefore good for lovers to be kept at a distance for some time <em>(a day? a week? which periodicity?)</em>, even if this time of being away may be uncomfortable.
The resulting passion will (possibly) be greater.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Thus, there is a <strong>threshold</strong> of the passions at which the absence switches effect—what is this threshold, how to we know it, Hume does not say. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Hume’s Passions: Love Cannot Be Defined2021-08-04T13:50:00+00:002021-08-04T13:50:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/101<blockquote>
<p>’Tis altogether impossible to give any definition of the passions of <em>love</em> and <em>hatred</em>; and that because they produce merely a simple impression, without any mixture or composition.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section I</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Love cannot be explained to someone who has never been in love.</p>
<p>Hume disserts in length on love and hatred, admitting beforehand that it will be impossible to define the passions.
The only real knowledge that one may have is the <strong>experience</strong> of those passions.</p>
<p>Why read Hume’s <em>Passions</em> in that case?</p>
<p>If the essence of love or hatred cannot be coldly <em>defined</em>, it remains however possible to say <em>something</em> about those passions.
Hume looks at <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/069.html">observable</a> effects, as one would before “<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/s/hume-passions.html">laws of nature</a>.”</p>
<p>The philosopher seeks to show that the rationalists are wrong to speak about certain things, especially surrounding feelings.</p>
<p>When one is in awe before a <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/074.html">beauty</a>, supports sympathetic relationships with others, or suddenly becomes incline to meanness towards someone—in short, when one becomes the slave of the passions—Hume seeks to value a certain <strong>type of knowledge</strong>: that which we know and feel “with the heart,” a type of truth that reason absolutely cannot grasp.</p>Hume’s Passions: the Connection2021-08-05T14:30:00+00:002021-08-05T14:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/102<blockquote>
<p>Suppose, that instead of the virtue or vice of a son or brother, which causes first love or hatred, and afterwards pride or humility, we place these good or bad qualities on ourselves, without any immediate connexion with the person, who is related to us: Experience shews us, that by this change of situation <mark>the whole chain is broke, and that the mind is not convey’d from one passion to another</mark> ….</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section II</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Always the fundamental importance of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/072.html">pride</a>, the relation of something or someone to the <strong>self</strong>.
Without a relation to self, it losses its influence on the passions.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But if it shou’d happen, that while the relation of ideas, strictly speaking, continues the same, its influence, in causing a transition of the imagination, shou’d no longer take place, ’tis evident its influence on the passions must also cease, as being dependent entirely on that transition.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section II</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>In other words: I easily imagine myself in love with the person I <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/080.html">desire</a> (in love, because there is the <strong>double relation</strong> so important to Hume).
When the passion is no longer there, when I cease to imagine myself in love when in the company of the other person—not by <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/075.html"><em>will</em></a>, but because I see that there is no longer a reason to consider myself in love—it is the end.</p>
<p>When does this natural transition between the idea and the idea (<em>i.e.</em> person) appear and when does it wash away, and why, Hume does not explain.</p>Hume’s Passions: Love and Beauty2021-08-06T18:00:00+00:002021-08-06T18:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/103<blockquote>
<p>Sex is not only the object, but also the cause of the appetite.
We not only turn our view to it, when actuated by that appetite; but the reflecting on it suffices to excite the appetite.
But as this cause loses its force by too great frequency, ’tis necessary it shou’d be quicken’d by some new impulse; and that impulse we find to arise from <mark>the <em>beauty</em> of the <em>person</em></mark>; that is, from a double relation of impressions and ideas.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section II</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>It is not enough to want to sleep with another person to be in love with them (such desire is neither reliable nor durable).
There is a <strong>necessary condition</strong> to be in love: that of <strong>beauty</strong>.
It is the glue that allows to eonnect the amorous conditions (tenderness and sex):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Kindness or esteem, and the appetite to generation, are too remote to unite easily together.
The one is, perhaps, the most refin’d passion of the soul; the other the most gross and vulgar.
The love of beauty is plac’d in a just medium betwixt them, and partakes of both their natures: From whence it proceeds, that ’tis so singularly fitted to produce both.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Beauty</strong> is therefore the true cause of the amorous passion.
<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/074.html">What is beautiful please us</a>, <em>a fortiori</em> when in regards to the supreme passion (the amorous passion).</p>
<p>Hume is nowhere specific by what he means by “beauty” (just as <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/101.html">he isn’t for love</a>).</p>
<p>It is obvious that he does not stop at cosmetic beauty, and that anyone can imagine many forms of beauty that pleases them.
What is beautiful to someone resides in a purely subjective, interior feeling.
We find something beautiful or we do not find it beautiful, it is not a rational choice.</p>
<p>Hume therefore invites us to simply remain attentive to our senses, to our feelings, since reason has practically no power there.
What form of beauty will awaken the amorous passion, this is particular to each person.</p>
<p>(Hume does say something: wealth, for instance, naturally produces pleasant impressions, which means it may possibly concur to the esteem of the other towards self.)</p>Hume’s Passions: Fantasies2021-08-07T16:00:00+00:002021-08-07T16:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/104<blockquote>
<p>One, who is inflam’d with lust, feels at least a momentary kindness towards the object of it, and at the same time <mark>fancies her more beautiful than ordinary</mark> ….
But the most common species of love is that which first arises from beauty, and afterwards diffuses itself into kindness and into the bodily appetite.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section XI</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>The amorous passion often <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/103.html">starts with beauty</a>.
It is continued with the <strong>imagination</strong>, remarkable human faculty.
It may be why, in bed, two lovers prefer turning off the lights—even if they find themselves beautiful.
Lest us not underestimate the force of imagination, which embellishes even what is already beautiful.</p>Hume’s Passions: the Rich and Powerful2021-08-09T14:00:00+00:002021-08-09T14:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/105<blockquote>
<p>Nothing has a greater tendency to give us an esteem for any person, than his <mark>power</mark> and <mark>riches</mark>; or a contempt, than his poverty and meanness: And as esteem and contempt are to be consider’d as species of love and hatred, ’twill be proper in this place to explain these phænomena.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section V</footer>
</blockquote>
<h2 id="dualist-thinking">Dualist thinking</h2>
<p>Hume always expresses himself in <strong>dualities</strong>, through <strong>oppositions</strong> (it is at the heart of his <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/092.html">system</a>):</p>
<ul>
<li>pride and humility;</li>
<li>love and hatred;</li>
<li>esteem and contempt.</li>
</ul>
<p>Hume tends to simplify what he sees by mapping everything to binary poles.
The philosopher may be an empiricist, an observer that draws conclusions from what he sees and feels, his metaphysical method almost always relies on a supposed binarity, a principle of excluded middle.</p>
<p>It is a methodically efficient way of thinking (although it constitutes <a href="http://blog.sens-public.org/marcellovitalirosati/scholia/237d6-9.html">an important pitfall in the occidental philosophic thinking</a>, the omnipresence of dualist thinking).
Isn’t there a way of escaping this structuralist dualism, efficiency paradigm by excellence?</p>
<h2 id="the-rich-and-powerful">The rich and powerful</h2>
<p>Back to the topic tomorrow.
For now, we can keep in mind that Hume always seeks to confirm his dualist system of love and hatred.</p>Hume’s Passions: Beauty and Wealth2021-08-12T15:00:00+00:002021-08-12T15:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/106<blockquote>
<p>The observation of convenience gives pleasure, since convenience is a beauty.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section V</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Hume takes note of our natural esteem for the owners of <strong>beautiful richness</strong>.
What is beautiful causes <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/074.html">pleasure</a>, obviously.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But after what manner does it give pleasure?
…
We enter into his interest by the force of <mark>imagination</mark>, and feel the same satisfaction, that the objects naturally occasion in him.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section V</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>The possession of objects of beauty (Hume uses chairs, cars, and generally speaking technical objects as examples—objects of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/design.html">#design</a> one may later say) is agreeable.
With the faculty of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/imagination.html">#imagination</a>, an observer sympathises with the owner of these commodities.</p>
<p>For instance: I naturally esteem the owner of a Barcelona chair or warm little house with generous windows and well integrated within its natural environment, because I find these objects beautiful and of good taste.
By <strong>sympathy</strong>, I am inclined to like the person who owns such objects.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/072.html">possession</a> of material goods is the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/077.html">source</a> of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/vanity.html">vanity</a> by excellence:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But the possessor has also a secondary satisfaction in riches arising from the love and esteem he acquires by them, and this satisfaction is nothing but a second reflexion of that original pleasure, which proceeded from himself.
This secondary satisfaction or vanity becomes one of the principal recommendations of riches, and is the chief reason, why we either desire them for ourselves, or esteem them in others.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>… and of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/085.html">ill-placed vanity</a> when these possessions are of bad taste (a huge McMansion which is made of hideous and cheap materials, for instance).</p>Hume’s Passions: Love and Riches2021-08-15T15:30:00+00:002021-08-15T15:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/107<blockquote>
<p>Upon the whole, there remains nothing, which can give us an esteem for power and riches, and a contempt for meanness and poverty, except the principle of <em>sympathy</em>, by which we enter into the sentiments of the rich and poor, and partake of their pleasures and uneasiness.
<mark>Riches give satisfaction to their possessor</mark>; and this satisfaction is convey’d to the beholder by the imagination, which produces an idea resembling the original impression in force and vivacity.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section V</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Hume reminds us of the importance of surrounding us with agreeable things, which bring pleasure, in <strong>quality</strong> rather than <em>quantity</em>.
Through <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/106.html">imagination</a>, one transitions towards esteem for a person who possesses agreeable <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/105.html">commodities</a>.</p>
<p>Coherent with Hume’s <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/092.html">system</a>, it is the passion of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/080.html">love</a> which is at stake, through <strong>sympathy</strong>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This agreeable idea or impression is connected with love, which is an agreeable passion.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Finally, it is once again thanks to the <strong>double relation of impressions and ideas</strong>, a necessary correspondence to cause these passions.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It proceeds from a thinking conscious being, which is the very object of love. From this relation of impressions, and identity of ideas, the passion arises, according to my hypothesis.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A rich person is satisfies themself with what she owns, thus causing attraction of others, <em>even though the latter take no personal interest (because having no possibility in sharing and benefiting from the rich’s commodities)</em>—by pure <strong>sympathy</strong>.</p>Hume’s Passions: Athletic Beauty2021-08-17T18:00:00+00:002021-08-17T18:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/108<blockquote>
<p>[T]the principal part of personal beauty is an air of health and vigour, and such <mark>a construction of members as promises strength and activity</mark>.
This idea of beauty cannot be accounted for but by sympathy.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section V</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>What is <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/074.html">beautiful</a> causes <strong>attraction</strong>; a vigorous, harmonious and active body causes a feeling of beauty; athletic bodies are attractive, generators of passion.</p>
<p>Practising sport, physical activity<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> is therefore favourable both for the self and for the passion, because it participates to the notion of <strong>beauty</strong> in someone.
At one end of the spectrum: the trained body of an athlete is agreeable to sight, especially in action.
The pleasure caused by observing such performance, the admiration felt towards it, is due to the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/106.html">sympathy</a> one naturally feels towards this show of beauty.</p>
<p>In addition to personal gains (technique, force, movement, etc.) which augment the esteem one has towards themself (by their athletic capacities and their body’s constitution), one also attracts the esteem of others (and their regard, during a performance in competition for instance).</p>
<p>Hume therefore reminds us, in the middle of a philosophy treaty, of the importance of <strong>physical culture</strong>—and not merely <em>grooming</em> or <em>cosmetic makeup</em>.
Physical beauty is, in this sense, largely in connection with a certain <strong>athletic functionalism</strong> (“health;” “vigour;” “strength;” “activity;”).</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Physical activity favours cognitive faculties, as well as participating to an overall better health (walking for that matter is very favourable for reflection, it is even central in the philosophical exercise, for Aristotle or <a href="https://www.ledevoir.com/societe/transports-urbanisme/625131/philosophie-l-esprit-en-marche">Rousseau</a> for example). <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Hume’s Passions: Benevolance and Anger2021-08-22T13:45:00+00:002021-08-22T13:45:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/109<blockquote>
<p>The passions of love and hatred are always followed by, or rather conjoin’d with benevolence and anger.
’Tis this conjunction, which chiefly distinguishes these affections from pride and humility.
…
We may, therefore, infer, that <mark>benevolence and anger are passions different from love and hatred</mark>, and only conjoin’d with them, by the original constitution of the mind.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section VI</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Hume seems to have been wrong: by introducing additional distinct passions to those of love and hatred, he moves away from his <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/092.html">system</a> of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/091.html">four passions</a>.</p>
<p>But Hume will not admit he was faulty: this addition would actually be <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/110.html">compatible, even coherent</a> with his system.</p>Hume’s Passions: System II2021-08-22T14:00:00+00:002021-08-22T14:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/110<blockquote>
<p>In examining those ingredients, which are capable of uniting with love and hatred, I begin to be sensible, in some measure, of a misfortune, that has attended every system of philosophy, with which the world has been yet acquainted.
’Tis commonly found, that in accounting for the operations of nature by any particular hypothesis; among a number of experiments, that quadrate exactly with the principles we wou’d endeavour to establish; there is always some phænomenon, which is more stubborn, and will not so easily bend to our purpose.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section VI</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Is hume conceding flaws in his own system?</p>
<p>…no:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But as the perceptions of the mind are perfectly known, and I have us’d all imaginable caution in forming conclusions concerning them, I have always hop’d to keep clear of those contradictions, which have attended every other system.
Accordingly the difficulty, which I have at present in my eye, <mark>is no-wise contrary to my system</mark>; but only departs a little from that <mark>simplicity</mark>, which has been hitherto its principal force and beauty.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section VI</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Hume is being <strong>vain</strong> (<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/085.html">literally</a><sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>): his system is the best, he sustains, because of the certainty of the data given by <strong>perception</strong>, and because the “<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/s/hume-passions.html">laws</a>” he deducts are so <strong>simple</strong>.</p>
<p>The philosopher does not admit that he was faulty, relying on naturalist arguments to clear the apparent contradictions affecting his system (which are mere variants compatible, even coherent with his system):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As nature has given to the body certain appetites and inclinations, which she encreases, diminishes, or changes according to the situation of the fluids or solids; she has proceeded in the same manner with the mind.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section VI</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>But Hume was wrong: his <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/092.html">system</a> of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/093.html">four passions</a> was too good (simple<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup>) to be true (complete).</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Hume is being vain, literally, in his own words: “Every thing, belonging to a vain man, is the best that is any where to be found.” (<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/085.html">#085</a>) <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>Corollary: <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/simplicity.html">simplicity</a> participates in the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/beauty.html">beauty</a> of something. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Hume’s Passions: Compassion and Imagination2021-08-23T15:00:00+00:002021-08-23T15:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/111<blockquote>
<p>Add to this, that pity depends, in a great measure, on the contiguity, and even sight of the object; which is a proof, that ’tis deriv’d from the <mark>imagination</mark>.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section VII</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>There are <strong>many causes</strong> (“Add to this”) to pity and compassion, which Hume only partially enumerates; but <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/imagination.html">#imagination</a> appears to be the most important above all, which power and effects should not be underestimated.
It is imagination that causes, “in a great measure” according to Hume, pity and compassion, since such passions arise even when there is no real harm:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[T]he <mark>imagination</mark> is affected by the <em>general rule</em>, and makes us conceive a lively idea of the passion, or rather feel the passion itself, in the same manner, as if the person were really actuated by it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The sight of a weapon (a sword, for example) naturally produces a feeling of pity because of the harm such object can cause to others—even when nothing happens.
Hume insists on the certainty of perception (the <strong>double relation of impressions and ideas</strong>, <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/107.html">which</a> <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/103.html">keep</a> <a href="(https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/094.html)">coming</a> <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/095.html">back</a>), however one cannot ignore the potentially misleading but nonetheless real effect of imagination on the passions.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A spectator of a tragedy passes thro’ a long train of grief, terror, indignation, and other affections, which the poet represents in the persons he introduces.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A story, although made of pure fiction, is enough to move us.</p>
<p>We are therefore (<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/079.html">suspicious corollary</a>) naturally compassionate.</p>
<p>Should we distrust passions deriving from such artificial causes, easily simulated?</p>Hume’s Passions: Comparison2021-08-24T18:00:00+00:002021-08-24T18:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/112<p>Prelude to envy and malice.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So little are men govern’d by reason in their sentiments and opinions, that they always judge more of objects <mark>by comparison</mark> than from their intrinsic worth and value.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section VIII</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Human beings are profoundly <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/077.html">irrational</a>—this has <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/076.html">already</a> been said.</p>
<p>Their biggest epistemological pitfall?
<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/089.html">Comparison</a>, which terrible passions derive from:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[O]bjects appear greater or less by a comparison with others.
We have so many instances of this, that it is impossible we can dispute its veracity; and ’tis from this principle I derive the passions of <mark>malice</mark> and <mark>envy</mark>.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section VIII</footer>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Malice</strong> and <strong>envy</strong>: <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/109.html">more</a> passions which did not figure in Hume’s initial (and <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/110.html">too simple</a>) <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/092.html">system</a>.</p>
<p>The proofs Hume brings up seem so irrefutable (so many examples—typical argument from an empiricist), who keeps finding new <em>extensions</em> to his system.</p>
<p>How far will Hume’s treaty on the passions bring us?</p>Hume’s Passions: Envy and Malice2021-09-03T13:28:00+00:002021-09-03T13:28:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/113<blockquote>
<p>’Tis from the <mark>principle of comparison</mark> that both these irregular appetites for evil arise.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section VIII</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Hume has already presented the great epistemological pitfall of men, <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/112.html">comparison</a>—a significant source or <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/098.html">pride</a>.
He dwells on it to explain <strong>envy</strong> and <strong>malice</strong>, two (<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/092.html">additional</a>) passions which he distinguishes as follows:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This reasoning will account for the origin of envy as well as of malice. The only difference betwixt these passions lies in this, that envy is excited by some present enjoyment of another, which by comparison diminishes our idea of our own: Whereas malice is the unprovok’d desire of producing evil to another, in order to reap a pleasure from the comparison.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section VIII</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>It is the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/099.html">proximity</a> with others (resemblance, similarity of condition) which produces envy.
A peasant is less envious of a rich lord than of another peasant of the same status who happens to be more fortunate than him.
Malice would consist for the former to sabotage the latter in order to feel less inferior, through comparison.</p>
<p>It is therefore not by <em>pure</em> malice that human beings are mean, but rather by putting a given situation in relation to <strong>themselves</strong>, to their own <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/pride.html">pride</a>.</p>Hume’s Passions: Despise and Benevolence2021-09-06T15:00:00+00:002021-09-06T15:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/114<p>Hume explains the passions of hatred and benevolence in contraposition one with the other<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A strong impression, when communicated, gives a double tendency of the passions; which is related to benevolence and love by a similarity of direction; however painful the first impression might have been.
A weak impression, that is painful, is related to anger and hatred by the resemblance of sensations. Benevolence, therefore, arises from a great degree of misery, or any degree strongly sympathiz’d with: Hatred or contempt from a small degree, or one weakly sympathiz’d with; which is the principle I intended to prove and explain.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section IX</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>This principle, Hume explains it not only with the means of reason (there you go, rationalists), but also by leveraging <strong>experience</strong>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Nor have we only our reason to trust to for this principle, <mark>but also experience</mark>.
A certain degree of poverty produces contempt; but a degree beyond causes compassion and good-will. We may under-value a peasant or servant; but when the misery of a beggar appears very great, or is painted in very lively colours, we sympathize with him in his afflictions, and feel in our heart evident touches of pity and benevolence.</p>
<footer>David Hume, <cite>A Treatise of Human Nature</cite>, book II, part II, section IX</footer>
</blockquote>
<h2 id="the-argument">The argument</h2>
<p>The argument is amusing because it starts with a <em>cheluasm</em>—not sure if it’s the proper counterpart to the French <em lang="fr">chleuasme</em>, which consists of a self-deprecation in order to increase one’s own appreciation.
Hume is an empiricist, his philosophy is founded by experience.
He pretends to prioritize the rational argument, which tenants of rationalism (who preach the philosophical superiority of reason) should agree to.
Experience will then confirm the rational conclusion.</p>
<h2 id="pity">Pity</h2>
<p>Hatred and benevolence can in part be explained through <strong>pity</strong>.
Since the importance of something always depends on its relation to self, one will either feel benevolence if the feeling of pity is strong enough (strong connection to self) or <strong>despise</strong> if the feeling of pity is weak (weak connection with self).</p>
<p>Once <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/100.html">again</a>, a matter of <strong>threshold</strong>, which implies there would be some sort of turning point where the passions derived from pity are reversed.
What is this threshold?
Hume remains extremely silent on this point, contempt with opposites which confirm (or <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/110.html"><em>extend</em></a>) his <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/093.html">system</a>.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Hume often expresses himself in dualities, assuming each feeling must have an exact opposite. This <a href="http://blog.sens-public.org/marcellovitalirosati/scholia/237d6-9.html">structural dualism</a> is suspicious and subject to <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/105.html">critiques</a>. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Slow Media2021-09-29T13:00:00+00:002021-09-29T13:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/115<p>I do not like daily blogging.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
<p>It is time-consuming and exhausting, even frenzied; and the rythm is neither sustainable nor desirable, both for the person writing and those reading.<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup></p>
<p>One of the goals in publishing this journal was to make brief but dense, fresh but timeless notes, written in the context of a <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/046.html">saturated information sphere</a>: select (and <mark>highlighted</mark>) passages, simple and clear syntax, prune comments—for an <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/067.html">attention economy</a>.</p>
<p>The brief form has its downsides: reductionnism, caricature, self-censorship.
Writing short posts should however not come at the expense of content of quality nor intellectual rigor.
In this sense, the mad rush of daily blogging appears to me difficult to concile with the desired sustainability and quality.</p>
<h2 id="slow-media">Slow media</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>Slow Media measure themselves in production, appearance and content against high standards of quality and stand out from their fast-paced and short-lived counterparts</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Slow media: <a href="http://en.slow-media.net/manifesto">manifesto</a> in favor of media consumption that is of quality, respectful, caring, sustainable.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>I attempted the exercise over the summer, unable however to follow <a href="http://blog.sens-public.org/marcellovitalirosati/">Marcello</a>’s rythm from hell, or the more posed one of <a href="https://larlet.fr/david/">David</a>. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>This is not a critic against daily bloggin in general: writing can be part of a sequence of signifying activities (expression, creativity, experimentation, social life…). Everyone has their approach; this note is reflection on mine. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>The Attention Market2021-10-11T11:30:00+00:002021-10-11T11:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/116<p>In a post showcasing a passage of his recent essay <cite><a href="https://theconversation.com/bonnes-feuilles-apocalypse-cognitive-155247" hreflang="fr">Apocalypse cognitive</a> [Cognitive Apocalypse]</cite>, sociologist Gérald Bronner discusses attention in the context of an unprecedented <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/046.html">infobesity</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The cocktail effect<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> illustrates the issues relative to the <mark>world’s most valuable treasure</mark>.
The attraction exerted by screens on our mental availability must not make us forget that these tools are merely an intermediate between us and the cognitive market.
They allow us to access more easily and more flexibly a supply which has become plethoric.</p>
<footer>Gérald Bronner, 2021</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Attention attraction, (mental) availability (cognitive) market, (plethoric) supply: attention is analyzed through an economic lense.
Attention is a ressource of great value (a “treasure”), but some corporations have been capable of capturing it, through the brouhaha of our busy lives.
Systems and interfaces have been built to incite users to “spend” more of their time within those environments.
The economic model of these data corporations translates to billions of profits in advertising, to the eventual harm of <strong>autonomies</strong> of individuals:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What will capture our attention?
Which propositions will snatch our precious available brain time?
Which cognitive products will have a concurential advantage on the market of information which has become metastasized?</p>
<footer>Gérald Bronner, 2021</footer>
</blockquote>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Bronner notes on the cocktail effect: “we are capable of having an intelligible conversation because despite this brouhaha, we can select and understand the words of our interlocutor. … Thus, we feel that we are completely immersed in our exchanges. But a few metres away, a stranger pronounces our name, and their voice appears suddenly and clearly apart from the brouhaha. Something in our brain warned us that some piece of information in this confused cluster of phenomena deserved to be consciously treated. This effect, which is named cocktail effect, has been studied for the first time in 1953 by Colin Cherry, cognition specialist at the Imperial College of London.” <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>New Elites2021-10-14T14:00:00+00:002021-10-14T14:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/117<p>In <cite lang="fr">La guerre du faux <span lang="en">[War of the Fake]</span></cite> (1985), a collection of essays published over a decade, Umberto Eco criticizes the mass media through mass media themselves (the newspapers).
His words on the displacement of power are so eloquent, they deserve to be put in today’s context:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have a nearly perfect consistency between two epochs [the Middle Ages and today] which attempt, through different means, to fill the gap between scholarly and popular knowledge, under the same ideological cover, that of a paternalistic project of directing people’s consciousness.
In both cases, <mark>the chosen elite reasons starting with written texts with a literate mentality</mark>, whilst translating into images the essential data of knowledge and the structures supporting the dominant ideology.</p>
<footer>Umberto Eco, 1985, pp. 111-112</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>This is exactly what is happening today with the lords of the Internet (Google, Facebook): to master a <strong>“literate” knowledge</strong> (computer code, machine languages, big data, cognitive neuroscience) and translating it “visually” (into graphical interfaces, simple and intuitive, <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/048.html">easy to use</a>, addictive) to extend their economic power (with billions of users as evidence).</p>
<p>More than ever, we should ask ourselves who are the “<strong>intellectuals</strong>” of the 21<sup>st</sup> century, and whether code literacy is a dominant factor.</p>Literature !== Data2021-11-12T22:00:00+00:002021-11-12T22:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/118<p>Literature is not data.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
<p>Author Stephen Marche defends this position in a 2012 essay, <cite><a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/literature-is-not-data-against-digital-humanities/">Literature Is not Data: Against Digital Humanities</a></cite>.
He disparages the approach of the digital humanities:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But there is a deeper problem with the digital humanities in general, a fundamental assumption that runs through all aspects of the methodology and which has not been adequately assessed in its nascent theory.
<mark>Literature cannot meaningfully be treated as data.</mark>
The problem is essential rather than superficial: literature is not data.
Literature is the opposite of data.</p>
<footer>Stephen Marche, 2012</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Therefore, Literature <em>must</em>—the author is being imperative—remain foreign to the dominant paradigms, such as <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/066.html">software performance</a> and economic productivity.
These aim <strong>universal quantification</strong> (numbers are handled much more fluently by machines), <strong>disambiguation</strong> (thanks to strict syntax—programs fail on the first ill-placed comma), <strong>mode</strong> (specific but reductive schemas), <strong>indexation</strong> (what can be searched and what can not).</p>
<p>The opacity of language, with all due respect to corporate managers who claim “to order the world’s information,” is one of the irreducible aspects of Literature:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The experience of the mystery of language is the original literary sensation.</p>
<footer>Stephen Marche, 2012</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>We will surely never exhaust the meanings of literary texts.
To formalize some parts, perhaps—it is the never ending quest of the humanities.
But to <em>data</em>-ify Literature as a whole, this is neither conceivable (nor appropriate) with the current technical means.<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup></p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>In JavaScript (as in other programming languages), the “<code>!==</code>” operator means “not equal to.” <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>To render language computable through a calculable syntax: such is the end goal of <a href="https://pierrelevyblog.com/?ref=journal.loupbrun.ca">Pierre Lévy</a>’s <abbr title="Information Economy Meta Language">IEML</abbr> project. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Data Are Not (Given) Data2021-11-14T02:10:00+00:002021-11-14T02:10:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/119<p>What is the problem with “data”?</p>
<p>Johanna Drucker suggests, in her <a href="https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/0b495250-97af-4046-91ff-98b6ea9f83c0#ch06">2019 essay</a>, that <em>data</em> are probably not as “given” as we think: <sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
<blockquote>
<p>… we see the phenomena I noted appear on the horizon: data mining with all its attendant visualization techniques ….
The graphical tools that are used for statistical display depend, in the first instance, on quantitative data, information that can be parameterized so that it lends itself to display.
<mark>Virtually no humanistic data lends itself to such parameterization</mark> (e.g., what year should a publication be dated to in the long history of its production and reception?), and it is in fact precisely in the impossibility of creating metrics appropriate to humanistic artifacts that the qualitative character of <em>capta</em>, that which is taken as interpretation rather than <em>data</em>, comes sharply into relief.</p>
<footer>Johanna Drucker, 2019</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Rather, we should refer to data as <em>capta</em>:</p>
<ol>
<li>data are not <em>given</em> like space and time, they must be <strong>produced</strong>;</li>
<li>data are always <strong>constructed</strong> in a particular manner, according to one’s own vision of the world;</li>
<li>to be known, data must be <strong>captured</strong>; some type of information has been retained and some has not;</li>
<li>data are therefore <strong>much less objective</strong> that they may first appear.</li>
</ol>
<p>More problems on <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/118.html">Literature as data</a>.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>In <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/119.html">French</a>, an increased confusion may be introduced by the same word being used concurrently both as the past participate “given” and the substantive noun “data” (“<em lang="fr">données</em>”). <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>“Écranvain”2021-11-15T17:00:00+00:002021-11-15T17:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/120<blockquote>
<p>Aware of the impossibility for the individual to truly control the economy of data, the <em lang="fr">écranvain</em><sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> attempts to identify these data and to manipulate them outside of their original frame</p>
<footer>Gilles Bonnet, 2017</cite>
</blockquote>
<p>What is this “écranvain” presented by Literature professor Gilles Bonnet in his book <cite>Pour une poétique numérique [In Favor of Digital Poetics]</cite> (2017)?</p>
<p>In short: a writer who understands the <strong>digital medium</strong>, both its potentials and its limits.
As the power held by tech giants (or <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/026.html"><em>deus ex machina</em></a>) is concentrated in unprecedented ways, the <em>écranvain</em> is a figure of resistance equipped with lucidty and <strong>know-how</strong>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Surely it is their responsibility [the screenwriter] to play the role of vigilant sentinel, whistleblower in the name of a singularity of expression of the world, <mark>when this singularity is threatened by a confirmist mercantile horizon which comes from a universal interoperability</mark>, which “aggregates information of all kinds reduced to a ‘common’ idiom” with reeks of a “data esperanto” [Éric Sadin, 2015].</p>
<footer>Gilles Bonnet, 2017</cite>
</blockquote>
<p>(See also: literature as field which <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/118.html">cannot be reduced to/as data</a>.)</p>
<p>In a world increasingly shaped by <strong>technical power</strong><sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup> (where corporations play on the same field as states, with conflicting interests), the <em>écranvain</em> is also a <strong>political</strong> figure.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>In <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/120.html">French</a>, Gilles Bonnet’s neologism
“écranvain” is a fun contraction between “writer” (<em lang="fr">écrivain</em>) and ”screen” (<em lang="fr">écran</em>). <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>Technique enabling <em>operationalization of thought</em>, to <em>put it to execution</em>, why leave the responsibility of writing and manipulating computer code to just the technologists? <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>The “Écranvain” Is a Hacker2021-11-18T16:00:00+00:002021-11-18T16:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/121<p>Like <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/023.html">Philosophers</a>, the “writer of screens” (<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/120.html"><em lang="fr">écranvain</em></a>) is also a <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/hacker.html">hacker</a>, seeking to understand the world:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is also something of a hacker in the <em lang="fr">écranvain</em>, identifying the <mark>codes</mark> where extreme power goes far beyond the boxes of our connected machines to determine our manners of beings.</p>
<footer>Gilles Bonnet, 2017</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>The writer-hacker handles “codes” of all kinds; equipped with knowledge, they handle a <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/010.html">craft</a> to understand the inner works of the world.</p>
<p>Even if it means derailing the machine when it works too well.</p>Against Immaterial Ideas2021-11-26T15:50:00+00:002021-11-26T15:50:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/122<p>In his book <cite>D’où nous viennent nos idées? [Where Do Our Ideas Come From?]</cite>, author and professor Éric Méchoulan underlines the fundamentally immanent nature of ideas:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><mark>Those who master techniques, who authorize their effects, who ensures broadcast count as much as the author of this or that work</mark>, as soon as one considers the fact that meanings do not transit from one brain to another in an immaterial and immediate manner.</p>
<footer>Éric Méchoulan, 2010, p. 46</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>In the light of such statement, the <strong>author</strong> of a Facebook or Twitter post is also the platform itself, which constitutes its writing context, its broadcasting medium, its <strong>(material) condition of existence</strong>.
The author of a letter written in software such as Microsoft Word also comprises the company itself, since it is a manner to put ideas in the world that is designed by the computer engineers.</p>
<p>Any idea redacted through a given software is therefore in (equal?) part produced by this same program.
Méchoulan means to reiterate the profoundly <strong>material</strong> aspect of ideas.
Technique, and by extension technology, is knowledge materialized.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is a new environment of production of truth assertions that articulates itself in the construction of a common culture (while its building is difficult to see), while the materiality of certain media is being erased or revealed.
We see just how important it is necessary to link <mark>the elaboration of ideas</mark> with the construction of a public and the history of truth and <mark>the invention and the broadcast of media</mark>.</p>
<footer>Éric Méchoulan, 2010, pp. 45-46</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Who are the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/023.html">new intellectuals</a> of the 21<sup>st</sup> century?
The <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/033.html">masters</a> of <strong>code</strong>, of <strong>programs</strong>, these <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/043.html">hidden texts</a> which give rhythm to everyday life?</p>
<p>It is paramount that we study with attentively—some may say <em>urgently</em>—this “environment of production” of common culture, led by a handful of “<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/026.html">machine gods</a>.”</p>Rough Environments2021-11-27T14:20:00+00:002021-11-27T14:20:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/123<p>Expression taken from Anthony Masure’s recent <a href="https://www.anthonymasure.com/articles/2021-10-head-publishing-chaumont">article</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In libre software culture, it is hazardous to think in terms of mere “tools” and “solutions”: by not being governed by companies with market objectives, free-of-rights (libre) work environments require understanding values of sharing and contribution, and involvement in the design of protocols.
<mark>Free software are often rough and unintuitive</mark>, and contest the status of being a mere “user.”</p>
<footer>Anthony Masure, <cite>Ouvrir le livre. HEAD – Publishing, une cellule éditoriale engagée dans la dissémination des savoirs</cite>, 2021</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>This “<strong>roughness</strong>” may echo the notion of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/048.html">“user-unfriendliness”</a> (counterpart of the pervasive user-friendliness) from critical designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby.</p>
<p>The <strong>friction</strong> in free software releases them from a congenital flaw of clean-cut interfaces: by avoiding the passivity of the “user”, they go beyond the simplistic binarity of “tools-solutions.”
They integrate within a fluid and dynamic processes which could not be frozen in predefined ways of doing things, decided by programmers-computer-scientists-engineers-designers, whose work is (often) dictated by market or capital (rather than being centred on the true <a href="https://rachelcoldicutt.medium.com/what-is-community-hardware-and-software-57ecddbe8bd2">community needs</a>, respecting of users’ rights, inciting <a href="http://blog.sens-public.org/marcellovitalirosati/cequipourrait/fonctionnement.html">critical thinking</a>).</p>Design and Democracy2021-12-15T13:04:00+00:002021-12-15T13:04:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/124<p>In a 2005 conference <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25224045"><cite>Design and Democracy</cite></a>, designer and researcher Gui Bonsiepe laments over the lack of ethical and political concern in the design practice.
He is alarmed by the fact that designers are primarily working on aesthetics:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With concern, one can observe the growth of a generation of designers that obsessively focuses on <mark>symbolic aspects</mark> of products and their equivalents in the market—branding and self-branding—and that doesn’t know anymore how to classify joints.</p>
<footer>Gui Bonsiepe, <cite>Design and Democracy</cite>, 2005</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Of particular interest in this text is the underlying political value of aesthetics, which often falls under the responsibility of design:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Appearances lead us to the issue of aesthetics—an ambivalent concept.
On the one side aesthetics represents the domain of freedom, of play—and some authors claim that we are only free when we play; on the other side aesthetics opens the access to <mark>manipulation</mark>, that is the increase of outer-directed behaviour.
When designing products and semiotic artifacts we want to seduce, that is foster a positive—or according to context, negative—predisposition towards a product and sign combination.
Depending on intentions, design leans more to one pole or the other, more to <mark>autonomy</mark> or more to <mark>heteronomy</mark>.</p>
<footer>Gui Bonsiepe, <cite>Design and Democracy</cite>, 2005</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>To offer citizens the means of emancipation (more <strong>autonomy</strong> through useful but not alienating solutions) or to constrain them to dependency (<strong>heteronomy</strong> through products, messages, interfaces which coerce or at least condition their behaviour), such is the ambivalence happening in design.</p>
<p>Ignored for a long time by the institutions and classical fields, design as <strong>projecting</strong> (not as a mere exercise of <em>style</em>) must be urgently addressed by the critical and cultural disciplines (namely the humanities<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>).</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Not so surprisingly, one can observe the presence of “humanistic” vocabulary in the industry discourse (in expressions like “human-centred design”)—a rhetorical use which calls to skepticism. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Book Machines2022-01-04T13:30:00+00:002022-01-04T13:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/125<blockquote>
<p>As a volume, a book offers essentially a solution to <mark>organize a discourse in space</mark>.
It has an architectural function.</p>
<footer>Frédéric Kaplan, 2011</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>In his 2011 article <cite>How Books Will Become Machines</cite>, Professor Frédéric Kaplan presents the Book as an architectural object.
<strong>Authors</strong> resemble architects in elaborating how knowledge will be organized:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Metaphorically, the Book can be thought of as a closed space, which can be internally organized, like a house, a small garden, a church, a theater stage.
The author plays the role of an architect.</p>
<footer>Frédéric Kaplan, 2011</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>As such, the conception of a <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/004.html">book</a> as a technical (and design<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>) object implies the conception of a dynamic architectural space where thinking is developed.
In what ways should architecture (a third-party field) play a role in this thinking and in what ways shouldn’t it (to maintain the specificity of the book)?</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>There is a multiformat publication exploring the book and the world of publishing (in French): <a href="http://livre-defi-design.arcanes.ca/"><cite lang="fr">Le livre en contexte numérique: un défi de design</cite></a>. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Digital Paper Trail2022-01-07T22:30:00+00:002022-01-07T22:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/126<p>A short intuition on philology.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Our current technological moment is marked by a tremendous paradox: as fragile as electronic media are and as fleeting to the historical record as they may be, they create <mark>enormous and potentially unprecedented opportunity for scholarship</mark>.</p>
<footer>Matthew Kirschenbaum, <cite>Track Changes</cite>, 2016</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>After erasure and red-pen corrections, draft sheets, etc., the digital offers spaces of enquiry to better understand an author’s life, their writing, unpublished texts.</p>
<p>The digital allows producing new <strong>trails</strong> (voluntary or involuntary), in a file’s “history” feature or in the database capturing the activity of users on a given platform.</p>
<p>Git repositories for example, which may constitute a rich deposit for observing the evolution of a text, or at least an additional layer of <strong>text</strong> (or code) to study.
Such is my intuition in studying <a href="https://abrupt.cc">Abrüpt</a> in my master’s project.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Herbert<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> wanted to save everything, “every single one of the myriad changes writers make while noodling around during a working session.”
He thought—<em>pace</em> David Foster Wallace—that <mark>rejected prose should be stored</mark>, possibly for use elsewhere, and that it might also be <mark>of interest to future scholars</mark>.</p>
<footer>Matthew Kirschenbaum, <cite>Track Changes</cite>, 2016</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>In praise of <a href="https://www.quaternum.net/2019/12/05/publier-les-carnets-eloge-du-brouillon/">drafts</a>?</p>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/126/capture-ecran-fil-commits.jpg"
alt="Feed of the changes in a text. Project source: <a href="//gitlab.com/antilivre/rimbaud.zap">RIMBAUD.ZAP</a>."
title="Screenshot of the web interface of a Git repository"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Screenshot of the web interface of a Git repository</strong>
<p>
Feed of the changes in a text. Project source: <a href="//gitlab.com/antilivre/rimbaud.zap">RIMBAUD.ZAP</a>.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p><figure class="Figure">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/126/capture-ecran-commit-git.jpg"
alt="Changes in a file. Project source: <a href="//gitlab.com/antilivre/rimbaud.zap">RIMBAUD.ZAP</a>."
title="Screenshot of the web interface of a Git repository"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Screenshot of the web interface of a Git repository</strong>
<p>
Changes in a file. Project source: <a href="//gitlab.com/antilivre/rimbaud.zap">RIMBAUD.ZAP</a>.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Frank Herbert was a reknown writer, author of the <cite>Dune</cite> saga. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Digital_Humanities?2022-01-20T16:30:00+00:002022-01-20T16:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/127<p>What are the <strong>digital humanities</strong>?
How can they constitute a discipline distinct (however inseparable) from the humanities <em>at all</em>?
What are the foundational principles?
Which are their methods?
How does one characterize a “digital humanist”?
What is the importance of the Digital Humanities reflection on the world today?</p>
<p>These questions will be explored through an eponymous book, <cite>Digital_Humanities</cite> (2012), authored collectively by Anne Burdick, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp.
Ten years later, their ideas remain as fresh as ever.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We live in one of those rare moments of opportunity for the humanities, not unlike other great ears of cultural-historical transformation such as the shift from the scroll to the codex, the invention of moveable type, the encounter with the New World, and the Industrial Revolution.
<mark>Ours is an era in which the humanities have the potential to play a vastly expanded creative role in public life.</mark></p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. vii</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Sometimes in manifesto-like style, sometimes examining the way of doing things by scholars (questioning <strong>legitimization</strong>, rethinking <strong>collaboration</strong>), the book is rich starting point for a multidisciplinary attitude, with expanded and revised audiences and methods:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is a global, trans-historical, and transmedia approach to knowledge and meaning-making.</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. vii</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Understanding the world: the initial impulse of any project animated by the merest curiosity.</p>Humanist Knowledge2022-01-24T13:25:00+00:002022-01-24T13:25:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/128<p>The importance of the humanities is not a question of personal values, of tradition; it is a matter of <mark>producing knowledge of another kind</mark>, in order to understand the world in a different way.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/127.html"><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite></a> (2012), the authors underline the continuity between digital humanities and its classical counterpart; only, the mutations happening in the contemporary world offer an opportunity to make the field evolve.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>No matter how imperiled by vocationalism, cost-cutting administrators, or the self-inflicted wounds of internecine battles, the humanities must survive because they embody distinctive modes of producing knowledge and distinctive models of knowledge itself.</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 7</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Producing new modes of knowledge in the computational era: such is the ambition of the digital humanities.</p>Design and Ideas2022-01-25T14:20:00+00:002022-01-25T14:20:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/129<p>Design is central in the Digital Humanities approach.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Understanding the rhetoric of design, its persuasive force and central role in the shaping of arguments, is a critical tool for digital work in all disciplines.</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 13</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>But design is not about <em>styling</em>.
It allows for substantial thinking and meaningful communication with a superset of writing tools, which span beyond—but do not exclude—the written word: executable programs, graphical interfaces, database design.
Digital literacy, or <em>design-skilled writing</em>, is the ink and pen of digital humanists.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One need only consider the subtle and tightly controlled interplay among words, sounds, and images … to understand that these techniques are—as with design—about more than simply production: they are the means with which to investigate and <mark>articulate an idea</mark>.</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 14</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Design in this context is also about producing <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/128.html">new modes of knowledge</a>, about exploring <mark>a new epistemological model</mark>.</p>Design and Writing2022-01-26T13:15:00+00:002022-01-26T13:15:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/130<blockquote>
<p>Like the word “writing,” the word “<mark>design</mark>” encompasses an array of activities from the everyday to the highly specialized.
“Big D” design ranges from the business plans and systems of “design thinking” to the “design sciences,” which include engineering and human-computer interaction, to the cultural critique and speculative provocations of “critical design.”</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 12</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Writing—as trivial as jotting down a groceries list, posting a memo, or writing a personal message—is also the space of choice for intellectual activity, in which <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/129.html">design</a> constitutes another extension.</p>
<p>Digital Humanities => writing++ ?</p>Tools and Requirements2022-01-26T13:20:00+00:002022-01-26T13:20:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/131<p>On the importance of humanist sensibilities in choices about digital tooling :</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If simply handed off to technologists or left to functionaries or commercial interests, many basic requirements for humanist scholarship and pedagogy will be lost.
…
In a digital world, choices about what remains and what is eliminated, what is made accessible, how and in what form, are just as enduring and just as potentially enhancing or damaging.</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 19</footer>
</blockquote>
<p><mark>How and towards which goal is software developed?</mark>
How is it funded?
Can the community inspect it, contribute to it?
Who are the authors?
To whom do they respond—commercial clients? paying users?</p>
<p>Human and social sciences mostly use <a href="https://ecrituresnumeriques.ca/fr/2022/1/14/Conference-The-Factory-of-Thinking-Protocols-Algorithms-Formats-and-Worldviews">commercial, proprieraty software purposely built for companies</a>, not specifically for the requirements of research or pedagogy.
In general, developing a feature is not a trivial task; the choices offered in given software are therefore not insignificant, and the software itself far from neutral.</p>
<p>Remaining loyal to the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/128.html">mission</a> of the humanities, such is the challenge at task for the humanist communities navigating through market-centric environments, in a world which constantly questions the “usefulness” of their discipline.</p>Critical Curation2022-01-28T13:15:00+00:002022-01-28T13:15:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/132<p>What does one do before huge, nearly infinite, amounts of documents available today?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The use of structured and/or tagged approaches to identify persons, themes, places, or features of a text provides a way to maximize the intellectual investigation of documents and to display these interpretations.</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 35</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Digital Humanities seek to find new <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/129.html">epistemological models</a>, beyond linear prose and classical forms of argumentation.
This includes an intellectual practice which appears to be rarely named, but which has become essential: <mark>critical curation</mark>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Critical curation is an essential scholarly practice in the print-plus and post-print world.</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 34</footer>
</blockquote>Digital Literacy2022-01-31T15:50:00+00:002022-01-31T15:50:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/133<p>The <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/127.html">Digital Humanities</a> approach attempts to pursue the mission of the traditional humanities, but admits the critical necessity for evolving intellectual skills in today’s context:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Even the most text-centric academic will admit the existence of visual rhetoric, but the skills to read interfaces, databases, and other content models are still very underdeveloped.</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 34</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Humanities are traditionally dedicated to studying and interpreting <strong>texts</strong>.
But what does it mean to “read” a text today, when its enunciation is so varied (written with complex software, disseminated through platforms which dynamics mutate constantly, consisted of additional layers which “encode” other meanings)?</p>
<p>For Digital Humanities, such skills enable at least the possibility of <mark>reading the underlying complexity of texts</mark>—such as software and lines of code responsible for structuring texts visually, programmatically, and intellectually, or the normative practices which seamlessly reproduce social and economic inequalities.</p>The Study of Code2022-02-01T15:00:00+00:002022-02-01T15:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/134<p>More weaving around <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/133.html">code and text</a> ideas:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The operations of computational media are created through the interaction of hardware and software.
These work according to protocols structured into their organization as code.
The study of code is driven by an interest in exposing the ways <mark>constraints make certain things possible, and exclude others</mark>.
But is code a text?
If so, what kind of text?</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 53</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>The methods of the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/127.html">Digital Humanities</a> imply a close, attentive reading in order to expose knowledge which could not be obtained directly in text, no matter what kind of text: reading between the lines, so to speak, to unveil world views embedded through formats and protocols, to decipher seamlessly invisible political discourses, or to show the socioeconomic effects resulting from complex computational processes.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The layers of software between the operations of a machine and the instructions given it by an operator offer a fascinating archaeological study, with cultural conventions often holding as much weight as technological advantage.</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 53</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Scholars such as Mark C. Marino underline <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/062.html">the urgency of understanding and studying code</a> which structures environments, and interactions they permit (because <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/030.html">code is law</a>).</p>
<p>Humanities and software, two apparently distant worlds, however reunited.</p>Knowledge ↔ Practice2022-02-02T13:40:00+00:002022-02-02T13:40:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/135<p>Still in <cite>Digital_Humanities</cite> (2012), the authors note the gap which has formed between practical and theoretical knowledge:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A division emerged over the course of the 20th century that separated humanities knowledge into study analysis on the one hand, and practice and application on the other.
…
In other words, the process of “how” became separated from the content of “what.”</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 76</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>This distinction tends to treat formal questions as second-class considerations—if not dismissing them altogether—but doesn’t it miss the constitutive part of practice in the construction of knowledge?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The “how” requires attention to design, format, medium, materiality, platform, dissemination, authorship, and audience, things that are all taken for granted or assumed to be implicit, value-neutral, secondary, or even irrelevent when scholars turn over their manuscripts to a university press.
But there is nothing neutral, objective, or necessary about the format of a book, the space taken by a page, the medium of paper, or the institution of a press.
In fact, the “what” is shaped by the “how” in a profoundly recursive, process-oriented manner.</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 76</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Design, once again, is not a <em>dressing technique</em> for ideas: it rather encompasses <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/129.html">“the means with which to investigate and articulate an idea.”</a>
It is an attitude which gives a crucial importance to the process and creativity in any project, even the most analytical ones (and vice versa, the intellectual effort is in turn constitutive of the practical processes).</p>
<p>Shouldn’t <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/010.html">craft</a> be regarded as an idea-making activity?</p>New Authorship2022-02-03T13:30:00+00:002022-02-03T13:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/136<blockquote>
<p>We are moving from an era of scholarship based on the individual author of the “great book” to an era of scholarship based on the collaborative authoring possibilities of the “great project.”</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 83</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>In <cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, the authors plead for a shift in the notion of authorship towards collective dynamics.
The author (singular) is no longer at the center of the process.
The <em>individual genius</em> is put aside in favour of <strong>collaborative</strong> projects:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The question is no longer “what is an author?” but what is the author function when reshaped around the plurality of creative design, open compositional practices, and the reality of versioning?</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 83</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>On the <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/007.html">death of the author</a>, other aspects of a work may be explored, considering it cannot be reduced to a single person or influence, with additional recognition on the different roles involved (is a designer contributing to the process an author as well? what tools enabled the development of a given project and which are their respective creators? can we imagine the public contributing through open and accessible processes?).</p>Collaborative Publishing2022-02-06T16:20:00+00:002022-02-06T16:20:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/137<p>The authors of the book <cite>Digital_Humanities</cite> take note of the new dynamics for the production of knowledge, questioning established practices while also suggesting intelligent mutations for the aging legitimation frameworks:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some scholars and artists have published versions of their books online using paragraph-by-paragraph blogging software or other collaborative annotation and commenting engines.
<mark>Not only does this repudiate the notion of intellectual property as something locked up by copyright and exclusive licensing agreements</mark>, it allows the authors to receive immediate feedback by hundreds of self-selecting peer reviewers ….
Crowd-sourced evaluations of scholarly arguments … are transforming both the authorship function and conventional knowledge platforms: A book is not simply “finished” and “published,” but is now part of a much more dynamic, iterative, and dialogical environment that is predicated on versioning, crows-sourced models of engagement and peer review, and open-source knowledge and publication platforms.</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 85</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>How can a broader public, well beyond the scientific community, become involved while maintaining intellectual rigour and in respect for the specific requirements of given fields?
What can knowledge-producing institutions learn from open collaborative models?
Why restrict the possibility of acting on knowledge only to elite communities?</p>
<!-- The Wikipedia project, where anyone can contribute on any subject, is a great example. -->Publish?2022-02-07T16:40:00+00:002022-02-07T16:40:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/138<p>What does it mean to <strong>publish</strong> today, as this action seems within anyone’s reach?
The legitimization frameworks (how does one know who to trust?) are at stake, since the very notions of “<strong>publication</strong>” (content produced by amateur bloggers and video makers, but also investigation journalists and field-expert scholars) and “<strong>audiences</strong>” (reached at a global scale, in quasi-immediacy) are being shaken up:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Distribution mechanisms will need to evolve in ways that recognize the productive distinction between popular work and more specialized scholarship, and address the complex set if issues that will continue to emerge around intellectual property, licensing and use, peer-review, and the role of professionals in publishing, preserving, and providing access to scholarship.
…
But the theoretical issues remain: What is a publication?
Who will undertake the making-public of arguments, research projects, repositories, archives, and other materials of the human record, its creative expression and interpretation?</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 96</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>To publish, in the sense of “making public,” has been trivialized by tools and platforms; Digital Humanities addresses problems which arise from these new dynamics.
<mark>How must we rethink publishing in the current context</mark> (a saturated <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/116.html">attention economy</a>, standardized by <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/067.html">calculatory logics</a> which often <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/131.html">suppress</a> nuances which are important to us)?</p>Learning + Playing2022-02-10T14:20:00+00:002022-02-10T14:20:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/139<p>Authors of <cite>Digital_Humanities</cite> (2012) lament the gap between the teaching modes inherited from closed doors and today’s hyperconnected culture.
Could these two worlds—the classroom vs outside the university walls—be reunited?
This idea is suggested in the book:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The digital environment offers expanded possibilities for exploring multiple approaches to what constitutes knowledge and what methods qualify as valid for its production.
This implies that the 8-page essay and the 25-page research paper will have to make room for the game design, the multi-player narrative, the video mash-up, the online exhibit and other new forms and formats as pedagogical exercises.</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 24</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>A renewed culture implies <mark>new talents, new <strong>skills</strong></mark> (design, programming, multimedia manipulation, <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/132.html">critical curation</a>), and along them <mark>new forms of <strong>knowledge</strong></mark>.
Why not embrace them rather than keeping them at a distance (if not in complete opposition)?</p>
<p>A video game may, for example, integrate historical elements in its narration; provoke ethical decision-making situations (e.g., in the context of caregiving); stimulate memorization through playful mechanisms (competition, cooperation).
Video gaming can therefore be part of the paradigm of <strong>learning</strong> (rather than mere <em>transmission</em>): the protagonist actively traces their own intellectual route (rather than simply receiving serial information, with the passivity this encourages), in addition to developing their spatial perception abilities, reflexes, and other skills.</p>
<p>Playing does not have to be opposed to learning, as it is (unfortunately) often the case.</p>Tools and Worldviews2022-02-11T14:30:00+00:002022-02-11T14:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/140<p>Tools are not neutral.
Technique is always <strong>materialized knowledge</strong>, a particular material form of thinking.
An object, a system or a process embodies a worldview and certain particular values.</p>
<p>This observation is even more prominent when thinking is formalized in the form of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/134.html">computer code</a>, which can be literally (and eventually literarily) read and analyzed.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Tools are not just tools.
They are <mark>cognitive interfaces</mark> that presuppose forms of mental and physical discipline and organization.
By <mark>scripting an action</mark>, they produce and transmit knowledge, and, in turn, model a world.</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 105</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Tools are therefore non-neutral agents to thought.
As “<strong>cognitive interfaces</strong>,” they determine the conditions of access and possibility of knowledge (what is technically possible to do—therefore possible—and what is technically not possible to do—therefore impossible).
The intricacy between <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/038.html">technique and intellect</a> is such that the two cannot be separated.</p>
<p>The second part of the passage is significant: tools (code in particular) allows the operationalization of worldviews, “executing” them.
They render a project, an idea, technically possible, highlighting the <strong>power</strong> of writing, its effective property.</p>
<p>Scripting: writing for execution.
(Hence the fundamental importance of technique.)</p>Curiosity and Depth2022-02-12T21:40:00+00:002022-02-12T21:40:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/141<p>What are the qualities of a learner in a highly connected and divided world?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Two-and-a-half millennia ago, the Greek poet Archilochus broke the world of knowledge into two camps, represented by two different types: “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
…
The hedgehog’s great depth is inspiring for its rigor; the fox’s curiosity is astonishing in its energy.
It is no an either/or situation: the goal is hybridization, the creation of hedgefoxes, capable of ranging wide, but also of going deep.</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 97-98</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>How to avoid the pitfalls of both profiles while retaining their respective assets?
How does one specialize without putting on (too many) blinders?
How pursue multiple (and often disparate) activities without scattering oneself in the surface?</p>
<p>Digital humanities are a discipline of <strong>interfaces</strong>, thanks to new connections (between fields, tools, cultures or media).
But more than mere connection-making, it is the understanding the inner works of each part which drives the curiosity of the “hedgefox.”</p>
<p>Going beyond interfaces, thinking without limits—especially not those of a computer screen or a paper page.</p>Design and Structures of Argument2022-02-14T14:50:00+00:002022-02-14T14:50:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/142<p>On the importance of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/t/design.html">#design</a> for the practice of the humanities today:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Design means shaping knowledge and endowing it with form; the field of design encompasses structures of argument.</p>
<footer><cite>Digital_Humanities</cite>, p. 118</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Knowing how to manipulate the forms of knowledge is necessary in order to manipulate knowledge itself—<strong>technical knowledge</strong> is condition for knowing altogether.
Language and <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/129.html">writing</a><sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> are technologies of intellect (<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/010.html">craft</a>), they are not merely conditions of possibility for thinking or even its emerging tip, they <strong>are</strong> knowledge, since any tool embodies condensed forms of knowledge, values and <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/140.html">worldviews</a><sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup>.</p>
<p>What knowledge?
What forms?
What structures of argument?
What authorship?
What audience?
What curatorial choices?
What technologies?</p>
<p>Many questions, many possibilities—but there is work to be done.
This fragmental and exploratory <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/s/digital_humanities.html">series</a> on the eponymous book <cite>Digital_Humanities</cite> (2012) is over.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><strong>Design and writing</strong>: “Design-skilled writing as the ink and pen of digital humanists.” <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p><strong>Tools and worldviews</strong>: “The intricacy between technique and intellect is such that the two cannot be separated.” <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Political, Digital Writings2022-06-23T14:30:00+00:002022-06-23T14:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/143<blockquote>
<p>In this reading, we are engaging in a critical thinking on the mode of existence of the written form in the computer world and on its cultural consequences.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In their 2005 article, researchers Yves Jeanneret and Emmanuël Souchier underline the absence of critical thinking on the writing mediums in digital context, and in particular on their <strong>political</strong> and <strong>cultural</strong> effects.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We are seeing a shift in the loci of power and the grip on culture.
Traditional cultural actors tend to be dispossessed of the order of the text, in favour of those who, because of their technical skills ou their economic power, are creating for others <mark>the coditions of their expression</mark>.</p>
<footer>Yves Jeanneret et Emmanuël Souchier, <cite>L’énonciation éditoriale dans les écrits d’écran</cite>, 2005</footer>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/140.html">Writing is power</a>, and it is (among others) this power which is discussed here: a “writing-<em>over</em>”—a super-writing which anticipates, and eventually marks around, what others can write “<em>within</em>”;
a latent form of paternalism, invisibilized by an aura of neutrality of what is problematically named “<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/131.html">tool</a>”; “<mark>the sur-render to the principles of software</mark>.”</p>
<p>Hence the necessity—and even <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/062.html">urgency</a>—of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/123.html">questioning</a> these “tools”<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>: by whom and for what goal were they created?
How do they actually work, at the software level?
What behaviour do they induce?
What do they authorize (through their interface, formats, licenses, usage policy)?</p>
<p>Writings in the digital are <em>also</em> political.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>The authors speak of “architexts” to designate the tools of textual production, which allows to script the screen, to programme the means for accessing, producing and broadcasting texts. (From the same authors, see <cite>Pour une poétique des écrits d’écran</cite>, 1999.) <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Non-Places2022-07-15T17:35:00+00:002022-07-15T17:35:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/144<p>What are “non-places”?</p>
<p>In his 1992 essay, anthropologist Marc Augé defines non-spaces as opposite to culturally significant spaces:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which <mark>cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place</mark>.</p>
<footer>Marc Augé, <cite>Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity</cite>, 1995 [1992], p. 78</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Non-places are deprived of historical value; they are interchangeable and forgettable; they are, simply put, of plain banality.</p>
<p>Why then pay attention to them?</p>
<p>Precisely because of their <strong>overabundance</strong> today.
Supermodernity often reduces places to their most useful expression: commerce, transit, consumption, leisure—whilst emptying said places from their history and their meaning, rendering them as more or less abstract, and thus meaningless, “spaces.”</p>
<p>Clinics and hospital rooms, highways, shopping malls, slums, hotel chains, but also “travel” places (in particular those lacking characteristics, like a resort near a beach) tend to be non-places by excellence.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The hypothesis advanced here is that <mark>supermodernity produces non-places</mark>, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory’, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position.</p>
<footer>p. 78</footer>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Digital environments</strong> appear to be strong producers—<em>hyper-producers</em>—of non-places.
The <strong>generic</strong> nature of large platforms leads to uniform and transitory experiences: one clicks, scrolls, moves around and errs in relatively undifferentiated spaces where there are increasingly more loading screens to see.
Memory counts for little, since the ephemeral triumphs.</p>
<p>Web sites tend to <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/039.html">look alike</a>; in addition, their name or <abbr title="Uniform Resource Locator">URL</abbr> address (which define or circumscribe a given site) seem to lose importance considering the tendency to access content through a single click, or with a search query, always <em>via</em> a platform, <em>via</em> a particular search engine, or even through algorithmic recommendation.
These dynamic environments favour “ghost friendships” (through “subscription-based” relationships); they swap out curious and active research for passive and mindless consumption; as non-places, they <mark>encourage undifferentiated experience of the multiplicity of digital environments</mark>.</p>
<h2 id="why-resist-non-places">Why resist non-places?</h2>
<p>Internet is eminently multiform (there is an incommensurable number of web sites), but its increasing “<strong>platformization</strong>” appears to extend the phenomenon of non-spaces into the digital realm.</p>
<p>Non-spaces proliferate, but they seem to have detrimental effects from an anthropologic standpoint, such as “<strong>desingularization</strong>” of the individual and more generally the <strong>degrading of experiences</strong>.</p>
<p>This observation leads to the importance of making authentic “<strong>sites</strong>,” authentic <strong>places</strong>, whose history and culture forge their singularity; to promote the diversity, richness and <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/068.html">depth</a> of experiences rather than single, instrumental ends (e.g. “producing more consumers”—a reductive but common imperative).</p>
<p>More critical thought could be put into this issue. To be continued.</p>Teaching the Activity of Publishing2022-08-21T17:45:00+00:002022-08-21T17:45:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/145<p>In his column published in <em>Le Monde</em> newspaper in 2012, Oliver Ertzscheid ponders on the importance of a basic digital culture for everyone.
He opens his text by citing John Perry Barlow’s emblematic <a href="https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence"><cite>A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace</cite></a> (1996), which he compares to students born the same year.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>16 years later [in 2012], for these digital natives, there is absolutely nothing left of this declaration of independence.
On the contrary, most of the cyberspace is a closed world, proprietary, controlled by marketing, governed by shackles of arbitrary norms, liberticidal laws and “privative” technologies.
<mark>A hyperterritorialized world under the control of a few multinationals.</mark>
Apple, Facebook and Google solely decide, according to their own criteria what is publishable and what is not, often invoking the motive of “nudity” or “pornography,” and applying it, for example, to closing an account with a user who chose Courbt’s “Origin of the world” as a profile picture.</p>
<footer>Olivier Ertzscheid, 2012, archived on <a href="https://affordance.typepad.com/mon_weblog/2012/04/et-si-on-enseignant-vraiment-le-numerique-.html" target="_blank">affordance.info</a></footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Barlow’s text has not aged well, neither has this generation born, like me, in 1996—a generation which does not seem to care about the democratic future of a society increasingly “integrated” (the term is technical) into “cyberspace” (archaism kept intentionally).</p>
<p>Personal exchanges mostly transit through “privative” apps (like Meta’s Messenger), social life happens in parallel spaces that are Meta Instagram’s Stories, entire workspaces rely on Google’s services (editing tools, document storage, professional and personal email), the same company to which we give away nearly all the “cartography” of our lives (from web searches to itineraries on the road).
We have two companies to choose from when it comes to the operating of our computer (Apple and Microsoft).
These private systems have at least two points in common:</p>
<ol>
<li>They are <strong>transversal</strong> and generic (everyone uses them, in all sectors and in all spheres of life, personal and professional).</li>
<li>They are <strong>non-choices</strong>, choices by default proposed by the industry and consolidated by mass adoption.</li>
</ol>
<p>The problem of “digital illiteracy” is not so much that a person does not understand anything about computers (it is actually pretty normal), but that <mark>it becomes impossible for them to have any basic understanding of how systems of their everyday life works</mark>, forcing them to entrust private companies (whose main purpose is to generate profits and to incite consumption) with significant parts of their lives.</p>
<p>There are many conditions that lead to a healthy democracy.
One of them could consist in guaranteeing individuals the possibility “knowledge-action”—not only liberty, but also the knowledge of <em>how</em> to exercise this liberty.
For Bernard Stiegler, cited by Oliver Ertzscheid, this is done through the <strong>activity of publishing</strong>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Teaching the activity of publishing and making it the pivot of learning all different kinds of knowledge.
With the same importance that we teach reading and writing.
Learning to inform and document the activity of publication in its context, in its various environments.
<mark>Understanding that the impossibility of mastering a “publishing knowledge” will tomorrow be an obstacle and an inequality as cleaving as is today the non-mastery of reading and writing, a new digital illiteracy unfortunately already observable.</mark>
This issue is essential in order for each individual to find their place in the moving digital world, but it is also a concern for our collective future, as Bernard Stiegler reminded us: “Democracy is always linked to a publishing process—what is rendered public—which makes possible a public space: the alphabet, the printing press, audiovisual, digital.”</p>
<footer>Olivier Ertzscheid, 2012, archived on <a href="https://affordance.typepad.com/mon_weblog/2012/04/et-si-on-enseignant-vraiment-le-numerique-.html" target="_blank">affordance.info</a></footer>
</blockquote>
<p>To understand the “read-write” processes of the everyday life means enabling the possibility of still having a grasp on one’s very own life.</p>Media Overdeterminism2022-08-29T14:40:00+00:002022-08-29T14:40:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/146<blockquote>
<p>De Tocqueville, in earlier work on the French Revolution, had explained how it was the printed word that, achieving cultural saturation in the eighteenth century, had homogenized the French nation.
Frenchmen were the same kind of people from north to south.
The typographic principles of uniformity, continuity, and lineality had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society.
The Revolution was carried out by the new literati and lawyers.
…
De Tocqueville’s contrast between England and America is clearly based on the fact of typography and of print culture creating uniformity and continuity.</p>
<footer>Marshall McLuhan, <cite>Understanding Media</cite>, 1967</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>The effects attributed by McLuhan to mass media (in this case, the printing press) are grave and deserve immediate attention: <mark>a media would have the potential of creating cultural homogeneity across a whole nation</mark>, in particular when this media reaches “cultural saturation” (an expression whose meaning could be further discussed).</p>
<p>What did Tocqueville <em>actually</em> say?
By which perspicacity had he obtained, in the 19<sup>th</sup> century, the shocking conclusion carried by McLuhan?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I shall cite only one example from a thousand.
In the reports to the minister about the state of the book trade in the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, I read that there had existed important printing works in provincial towns which now have no printers or else have nothing for printers to do.
It is, however, indisputable that infinitely more written material of every kind was published at the end of the eighteenth century than in the sixteenth; it simply was that the flow of thought radiated now from the centre, as Paris had engulfed the provinces.</p>
<footer>Alexis de Tocqueville, <cite>Ancien Regime and the French Revolution</cite> (translated by Gerald Bevan), 1856</cite></footer>
</blockquote>
<p>However:</p>
<ol>
<li>Tocqueville’s observations, who states from the introduction his wish to concentrate himself on a contemporary subject, were <strong>false</strong> (many printers, in order to escape the severe censorship, simply labelled their works with different locations while still operating out of Paris, giving the impression that the production in France was everywhere similar to what came from the capital, which lack of historical hindsight did not allow De Tocqueville to see);</li>
<li>… and <strong>limited</strong> (Tocqueville states that “[s]eemingly all men living there … resembled each other exactly,” however he would only consider men from the superior classes, those who are part of the nobility and the bourgeoisie, which he simply compares one to another: “… they had the same ideas, the same habits, they pursued the same tasks, indulged in the same pleasures, read the same books and spoke the same language. No longer did they differ except in relation to privileges“—Tocqueville does not hide his blinders);</li>
<li>It is on such unreliable basis (obsolete and historically unproven) that McLuhan makes too favourable a reading for his case (Tocqueville never speaks of typography, only of print and in less specialized terms than McLuhan).</li>
</ol>
<p>In which case a statement such as this one:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary.
Prediction and control consist in avoiding this subliminal state of Narcissus trance.
But the greatest aid to this end is simply in knowing that the spell can occur immediately upon contact, as in the first bars of a melody.</p>
<footer>Marshall McLuhan, <cite>Understanding Media</cite>, 1967</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>on media (“the power of imposing its own assumption”) merely begs the question—however appealing it may seem.</p>Cyborg Literature2022-11-22T19:50:00+00:002022-11-22T19:50:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/147<p>In her 1985 text, Philosopher Donna Haraway uses the concept of cyborg to demonstrate that human and technique cannot be easily separated:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine.
It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices.</p>
<footer>Donna Haraway, <cite>A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century</cite></footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Haraway’s cyborg goes well beyond the humanoid, half-machine, science-fiction construction; rather, it serves as a starting point for an unsettling epistemology which shatters many concepts taken for granted in Western thinking.
Haraway’s philosophy suggests understanding the world where human and nonhuman dynamics are hybridized—to the point where “the certainty of what counts as nature … is undermined, probably fatally.”</p>
<p>Except it is not only about questioning this sole human and nonhuman opposition.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very problematic the statuses of man or woman, human, artefact, member of a race, individual entity, or body.</p>
<footer>Donna Haraway, <cite>A Cyborg Manifesto</cite></footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Haraway’s philosophie problematizes a wide range of dualisms (self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, etc…) and puts aside anthropocentric assumptions (especially the accompanying patriarchal logics of domination) that human beings have a special status.
The cyborg myth overturns established categories and sets the stage for Haraway’s political project.</p>
<h2 id="what-project-is-cyborg-literature-about">What project is cyborg literature about?</h2>
<p>What is the technology of cyborg literature?
For Haraway, it is <strong>writing</strong>:
writing is already a technological gesture, but it is above all the place where thoughts, values, intentions, and more generally possibilities of expression are inscribed.
It is through the prism of “inscription” that she defends the cyborg as the standard-bearer of her philosophy:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century.
Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.
<mark>That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine.</mark>
These are the couplings which make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of ‘Western’ identity, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind.
‘We’ did not originally choose to be cyborgs, <mark>but choice grounds a liberal politics and epistemology that imagines the reproduction of individuals before the wider replications of ‘texts’</mark>.</p>
<footer>Donna Haraway, <cite>A Cyborg Manifesto</cite></footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Between a perfectly clear communication and an imperfect language, cyborg politics privileges the one that would try to express something else; something ineffable perhaps, or that a given modality would not allow to express.
It emphasizes the importance of <strong>immanent diversity</strong>, the fact that one manifests oneself <em>no matter how one manifests oneself</em> (and no matter if it is done in text form or not).
In literary context, one could say that it is to refuse to give an exclusive primacy to the text (high place of (phal)logocentrism<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>).
In a non-literary context, it means paying attention to the expressions which diverge from the dominating logics, aesthetics and practices.</p>
<p>And these plural manifestations found one of the posthumanist epistemologies according to which (posthumanisms cannot all be reduced to a single current) the human and nonhuman, organic and nonorganic, cross, mix, hybridize, and become inseparable and take part in dismantling the numerous dualisms which hinder liberal, minority, diverses thinkings, warranting plural forms of life (and non-life).</p>
<h2 id="against-the-reproduction-of-the-dominating-ideology">Against the reproduction of the dominating ideology</h2>
<p>Hybridization implies <strong>reproduction</strong>; which could be related to the significant place occupied by sexuality throughout the text:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The new technologies affect the social relations of both sexuality and of reproduction, and not always in the same ways.
The close ties of sexuality and instrumentality, of views of the body as a kind of private satisfaction- and utility-maximizing machine, are described nicely in sociobiological origin stories that stress a genetic calculus and explain the inevitable dialectic of domination of male and female gender roles.
…
<mark>Sex, sexuality, and reproduction are central actors in high-tech myth systems structuring our imaginations of personal and social possibility.</mark></p>
<footer>Donna Haraway, <cite>A Cyborg Manifesto</cite></footer>
</blockquote>
<p>For Haraway, a militant feminist, the immanence of experiences is crucial because it structures ways of thinking.
The paradigm of reproduction (biological, but also ideological) takes a different meaning for women, who are directly concerned by reproduction (because physically involved during pregnancy), and for men, who instead experience the question in conceptual fashion.</p>
<p>With no clear conclusion—this idea is merely a lead—I will bear in mind the paradigm of reproduction (within the framework of Haraway’s “cyberfeminism”) for studying values and ideas embedded in systems.<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup></p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><strong>Phallogocentrism</strong>: The term “phallogocentrism” was proposed by Jacques Derrida, referring to the specifically masculine privilege of occupying the discursive space (and in particular, to favour certain forms of discourse rather than others). This position implies, as a counterpart, that a non-logocenteric expression carried by a woman or a person of colour, for example, will by default be received less favourably. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p><strong>“Systems”</strong>: whether systems are considered biotic or artificial, from software to people—they will almost certainly be both, that is, cyborg. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Digital Iteracy2022-12-16T16:50:00+00:002022-12-16T16:50:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/148<p>“Digital iteracy” denotes the renewed importance of intellectual tooling to navigate an increasingly computerized society.
The expression is articulated by David M. Berry in the introduction of <cite>Understanding Digital Humanities</cite> (also published in the form of an article, <a href="https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-multitudes-2015-2-page-196.htm"><cite>Computational Subjectivities</cite></a>):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I want to propose that, rather than learning a <em>practice</em> for the digital … we should be thinking about what reading and writing actually should mean in a computational age—which I call “iteracy”, drawing on the use of the term iteration within computation.
This is to argue for <mark>critical understanding of the <em>literature</em> of the digital</mark>, and through that develop a shared digital culture through a form of digital <em lang="de">Bildung</em>.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
<footer>David M. Berry, 2015</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>The “literature” put forward by David M. Berry is neither vaporous nor particularly specialized: it concerns very concrete and varied issues such as personal finances, consumption of cultural products or interaction with others.</p>
<p>Within the digital realm, experiences are governed by <strong>computational logics</strong>, algorithms fed by data (whose <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/119.html">given-ness</a> must be critically challenged) modeled according to particular schemas.
Digital environments are eminently <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/061.html">constructed</a>: everything must be formulated using the means of computation.
In a game like <cite>Angry Birds</cite> in which ballistic laws are simulated by algorithmic modeling, the real laws of chemistry (to grow grass) or physics (which explain why the eggs break) are never actually involved but only simulated by mathematical equations, algorithmic models.<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Additionally, for people in everyday life who need the skills that enable them to negotiate an increasingly computational field—one need only think of the amount of data in regard to managing personal money, music, film, text, news, email, pensions and so forth—there will be calls for new skills of financial and technical literacy, or, more generally, a <em>computational literacy</em>—in other words, “iteracy” or <em>computational pedagogy</em> that the digital humanities could contribute to.</p>
<footer>David M. Berry, 2015</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Most of the everyday is reconstructed through machines (and thus by those who are entrusted with such complex tasks), having a grasp on one’s own life through algorithmic environments requires a certain reading knowledge of digital objects, a minimal understanding of the functioning of software,<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup> beyond the mere <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/062.html">graphical representation</a> that is given to see—otherwise, <strong>human agency</strong> is reduced to a set of clicks, scrolls, and gestures, marked out by the restrictive modalities of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/123.html">“pretty” tightly polished interfaces</a> which cancel out the conditions for the emergence of a critical mind.</p>
<p>The aim of digital iteracy is as much philosophical as social, and pedagogical as political: ensuring, or least <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/064.html">permitting</a>, the formation of “computational thinking” which becomes a (technical) means for autonomous subjects to blossom.
Paying attention to the different materialities of the digital; experimental programming, with critical and creative intents; <strong>thinking with code</strong> in order to think differently about the very activity of thought: such are some of the possibilities proposed by the concept of iteracy.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><strong lang="de">Bildung</strong>: The author cites: “The German Idealists propose that the way to reintegrate the simplicity of known facts into a unified cultural science is through <em lang="de">Bildung</em>, the ennoblement of character. … <mark>The University produces not servants but <em>subjects</em>.</mark> That is the point of the pedagogy of <em lang="de">Bildung</em>, which teaches knowledge acquisition as a <em>process</em> rather than the acquisition of knowledge as a product. (Bill Readings, 1996, <cite>The University in Ruins</cite>, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, p. 65–67) <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p><strong>Angry Birds</strong>: The example is borrowed from Professor Jean-Guy Meunier. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p><strong>Functioning of software</strong>: The author states many fundamental concepts which enable the understanding of how software functions, such as: loops, repetition, recursion; modularity, encapsulation, abstraction layers; procedural, functional or object-oriented nature of a programming paradigm. <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Proceduracy2023-01-26T15:00:00+00:002023-01-26T15:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/150<p>What is proceduracy<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> expressed by English processor<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup> Annette Vee?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Proceduracy, which is my term for the literacy associated with computer programming, is <mark>the ability to break down complex processes into smaller procedures and express them explicitly enough to be read by a computer</mark>.</p>
<footer>Rik Hunter, <cite><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20220630223943/https://www.hastac.org/blogs/rikhunter/2009/09/18/literacy-proceduracy-conversation-annette-vee" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">The Literacy of Proceduracy: A Conversation with Annette Vee</a></cite>, 2009</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Proceduracy, which is more than a mere “coding” ability (writing using a vocabulary of the machines), is about modelling, mental processes which allow understanding the working of software systems—its different components, the steps of algorithmic treatment, its various layers of interaction.</p>
<p>The importance of proceduracy could not be underestimated, although it is often dismissed for disciplinary excuses (writing software is left to programmers and other computer professionals).
<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/062.html">But computer code has become too important to be left to computer scientists.</a>
The digital is cross-disciplinary, it is “infrastructural” to life in society:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I note that computer code has become infrastructural to Western society in the same way that text did during the Middle Ages; underlying most of our daily communication and activities is a layer of computer code.
Because computer code is so central to so much of what we do, the literacy associated with it is a literacy that matters, a literacy that is both infrastructural and powerful.</p>
<footer>Rik Hunter, 2009</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Citing professor Michael Mateas, Vee underlines the similar analogy of relegating language proficiency to a particular trade:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[O]ne can argue that <mark>procedural literacy is a fundamental competence for everyone, required full participation in contemporary society</mark>, that believing only programmers (people who make a living at it) should be procedurally literate is like believing only published authors need to learn how to read and write.</p>
<footer>Michael Mateas, <cite>Procedural Literacy: educating the new media practitioner</cite>, p. 101</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>More than learning to “code,” what “<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/133.html">literacy</a>” means in a widely computerized society points to a basic understanding of the general mechanisms at work, an understanding which helps citizens not only “function,” but also navigate autonomously, make genuine decisions (instead of constantly falling back on default choices), and even develop a critical, <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/148.html">computational thinking</a>.</p>
<p>To find oneself baffled in blissful contemplation before “simple,” but opaque solutions (as they become more difficult to dispense with), such is a reality that popular digital education must combat.
In this context, proceduracy can prove to be a useful framework.</p>
<details>
<summary>A few questions for digital literacy
</summary>
<ul>
<li>How does a computer connect to the Internet and how does it resolve an address?</li>
<li>What is a <abbr title="Uniform Resource Locator">URL</abbr>? How to read it?</li>
<li>By which means can one share a file between two devices, such as an image, a text or a video? Which intermediaries are involved, where are they located, and is it possible to get rid of them?</li>
<li>How does an artificial intelligence “fed”? Which are the patterns that give it away? Which informed uses can be made of it?</li>
<li>What is cryptographic encryption and how does it allow securing an exchange between two parties or validating the integrity of a digital artefact?</li>
<li>What is the difference between a protocol, a format and a programming language?</li>
<li>How to sort a dataset? How to produce a visualization, a particular modelling?</li>
<li>Is it possible to have access to the source code of given software? What are the values embedded in it?</li>
<li>Etc…</li>
</ul>
</details>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><strong>Procedural Literacy</strong>: The concept was previously coined by researcher Michael Mateas in his eponymous paper of 2005 <cite>Procedural Literacy: Educating the New Media Practitioner</cite>. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p><strong>Processor</strong>: It’s a slip of the tongue—Annette Vee is, of course, an English <em>professor</em>—but one that I could not resist keeping. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Interpretation and Meaning2023-02-07T02:00:00+00:002023-02-07T02:00:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/151<p>What is the meaning of technical objects?</p>
<p>Considering the proliferation of digital infrastructure whose functioning is increasingly complex and opaque, Bruno Bachimont speaks of a “crisis of intelligibility,” in particular the threat of no longer understanding the objects that surround us, leading to the impossibility of having a grip on them:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Undoubtebly the most important threat lies in the totalization of the contemporary technical system, when this totalization prevents alterity between the different technical systems and thus any <mark>friction</mark> enabling <mark>interpretation and the negotiation of meaning</mark> with tools and between humans. The totalization … has become clearly palpable with information technologies which have enabled complex treatments, and quasi-instantaneous execution and transmission. From calculations which one cannot grasp because of their complexity and speed, to their consequences on worldwide technical systems (financial, but also security and economic), we are experiencing a <mark>crisis of intelligibility</mark>. As mere toys of these systems that now have their own logics of calculation which grow out of the reach even of their own designers, we live more and more surrounded by the threat of technical and informational totalization.</p>
<footer>Bruno Bachimont, <cite lang="fr">Le sens de la technique: le numérique et le calcul</cite>, 2010, p. 177</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Bachimont underlines the eventual <strong>loss of meaning</strong> that results from the systematic compliance with “programs”<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>.
He denounces actions that become only passive or expected responses, because they are prescribed or conditioned by a device.
Technique creates a double tension between opening and limitation—<strong>opening</strong> thanks to new technical possibilities (providing the ability to accomplish new things or in innovative ways), but also <strong>limitations</strong> (rigidifying processes or permitting only certain actions), hence the “programmed reduction” Bachimont warns about—because it dissolves meaning:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>However, technique is also an instrument for alienation and elimination of meaning. … there is a tension articulating <mark>interpretative freedom</mark>, which seizes possible techniques in order to invent the future, and a <mark>programmed reduction which connects the future to the result calculated by the device</mark>.</p>
<footer>Bruno Bachimont, p. 69</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>The pessimistic attitude of technical determinism can be overturned with the means of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/133.html">literacy</a> (knowing how to read and write, how to “function” in society, and even defend oneself against sweet-talkers and <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/048.html">phony friends</a>).
Except it is not enough to know how to read, in the literal (or <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/052.html">optimal</a>) sense, one must also know how to interpret:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Agent of their own freedom <mark>thanks to the interpretation they bring</mark>, or instrument of one’s own alienation by becoming the implementer of a given device, the human being is caught in an opposition that they must manage to compose if they do not want to become imprisoned and lose their autonomy.</p>
<footer>Bruno Bachimont, p. 69-70</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>The tension is twofold: technique, vector of new possibilities, “eliminates the interpretative freedom that it also enables.”
The key of the “retrieving”<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup> of meaning therefore resides in the process of <strong>interpretation</strong>, not just agential freedom (the possibility to simply chose one given option or another) but investing through one’s individual consciousness: it is the cornerstone that allows moving beyond programmatic determinism (“escaping from the immanent programming of situations and objects is therefore the issue” announces Bachimont, p. 29).</p>
<p>There must be a possibility of reading but also writing, in order to negotiate meaning, which leads to potential (but necessary) conflicts and <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/123.html">roughness</a>.
The absence of friction (as in the paradigm of “seamlessness”, in particulra in digital interface design) erases the possibility of a discursive space, because there is nothing left to hold on to—it despises understanding by the user or the citizen by dissimulating its functioning.</p>
<p>This relates closely to Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic nightmare: without agency, the liberal, humanist subject dies.
For Bachimont, that is where meaning is suppressed.</p>
<p>An object regarded as content, as a message (computer code as <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/134.html">discourse</a> for instance) becomes a semantic structure from which meaning can be recovered—since the object is embodying thinking, <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/140.html">scripting actions</a>, programming futures.
Meaning is expressed through the writing of a program; it is exposed through reading; and, more significantly, it emerges uniquely via interpretation.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><strong>Program</strong>: “A program is nothing else than a device regulating the unrolling of time, the calculation or execution of a program, based on a structure specified in space, within an algorithm or a program.” (Bachimont, p. 167) <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p><strong>Retrieving</strong>: Retrieving “in the sense that one can reorient their response to an event, reevaluate it, reinterpret it in a horizon” (Bachimont p. 29). <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Apparatus & Desubjectification2023-02-15T21:50:00+00:002023-02-15T21:50:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/152<p>What is an apparatus?</p>
<p>Citing Michel Foucault, to whom is attributed one of the most important non-definitions of the apparatus<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> (because he doesn’t actually define it), philosopher Giorgio Agamben formulates the political implications of the concept:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.</p>
<footer>Giorgio Agamben, <cite>What is an apparatus?</cite>, p. 14</footer>
</blockquote>
<details>
<summary>The “apparatus” after Michel Foucault</summary>
<blockquote>
<p>What I’m trying to single out with this term is, first and foremost, a thoroughly heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the network that can be established between these elements …</p>
<p>… by the term “apparatus” I mean a kind of a formation, so to speak, that at a given historical moment has as its major function the response to an urgency. The apparatus therefore has a dominant strategic function …</p>
<p>… I said that the nature of an apparatus is essentially strategic, which means that we are speaking about a certain manipulation of relations of forces, of a rational and concrete intervention in the relations of forces, either so as to develop them in a particular direction, or to block them, to stabilize them, and to utilize them. The apparatus is thus always inscribed into a play of power, but it is also always linked to certain limits of knowledge that arise from it and, to an equal degree, condition it. The apparatus is precisely this: a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge.</p>
<footer>Michel Foucault, <cite>Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings</cite>, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon Books. 1980), pp. 194-96.</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Agamben synthesizes Foucault’s words in three points:</p>
<blockquote>
<ol>
<li>It is a heterogeneous set that includes virtually anything, linguistic and nonlinguistic, under the same heading: discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on. The apparatus itself is the network that is established between these elements.</li>
<li>The apparatus always has a concrete strategic function and is always located in a power relation.</li>
<li>As such, it appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge.</li>
</ol>
<footer>Giorgio Agamben, <cite>What is an Apparatus?</cite>, pp. 2-3</footer>
</blockquote>
</details>
<p>An apparatus implies implicit or explicit forms of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/049.html">power</a>.
A complex, reticular, and multiform dynamic emerges from it, rather than a precise and well-defined object.
However, the formulation is so broad, so general, that it becomes inoperative, because endlessly irreducible.
Such a generalization erases the specificity of the concept: if anything can be an apparatus, then what makes something not be an apparatus?
A more concrete paradigm becomes necessary.
(For instance the critical analysis of programs, of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/062.html">computer code</a>, which embody values and world views and carry a functional, executable aspect.)</p>
<h2 id="desubjectification">Desubjectification</h2>
<p>Beyond the mere concept of apparatus is the threat (or the fear?) of “<strong>desubjectification</strong>” that comes with <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/151.html">the proliferation of technical objects</a>.
For instance, Agamben appears to be particularly ablaze by the commonality of cellular telephones:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What defines the apparatuses that we have to deal with in the current phase of capitalism is that they no longer act as much through the production of a subject, as through the processes of what can be called <mark>desubjectification</mark>.
…
He who lets himself be captured by the “cellular telephone” apparatus—whatever the intensity of the desire that has driven him—cannot acquire a new subjectivity, but only a number through which he can, eventually, be controlled.
The spectator who spends his evenings in front of the television set only gets, in exchange for his desubjecivation, the frustrated mask of the couch potato, or his inclusion in the calculation of viewership ratings.</p>
<footer>Giorgio Agamben, <cite>What is an Apparatus?</cite>, pp. 20-21</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>(One may ask: is Agamben being <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/146.html">overly dramatic</a>?)</p>
<p>Without going as far as the death of the liberal subject (which was the ultimate nightmare of cybernetics figure Norbert Wiener) fallen to a <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/033.html"><em>deus ex (computo) machina</em></a>, Agamben highlights the fact that some aspects of life become, to some extents, parametrized, reduced to a calculated set of predefined constraints and agential pathways—allowing a political or economic system to simply function, even meaninglessly, at best, and perpetuating Deleuzian <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/054.html">systems of control</a>, at worst.</p>
<p><strong>Subjectivity</strong>, as a condition of critical thinking and the locus of agency, therefore appears to be one of Agamben’s dearest humanist pillars.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><strong>Apparatus</strong>: As the translators note, “We follow here the common English translation of Foucault’s term <em lang="fr">dispositif</em> as “apparatus.” In everyday use, the French word can designate any sort of device. Agamben points out that the torture machine from Kafka’s <cite>In the Penal Colon</cite> is called an <em>Apparat</em>. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Interfaciality2023-02-22T14:30:00+00:002023-02-22T14:30:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/153<p>In an <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/tcsa/34/7-8">issue</a> of <cite lang="en">Theory, Culture & Society</cite>, Anthropologist Tim Ingold draws interest in <em>surfaces</em>—in particular, the social relationships through them.
The concept of <strong>interfaciality</strong> could therefore be understood as a critical deepening of superficiality, considered in and for itself.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… the metaphysical assumption [is] that the true essence of things and persons is to be found deep inside them, in an inner core that can be reached only by breaking open the external appearance behind which it hides.
It is this assumption that so often leads us to equate the surface with what is ‘superficial’.
It is why we distrust surfaces and the meanings they convey: why we think we have to break through them or peel them aside, if we are ever to arrive at real significance.
But what if there is nothing underneath?
<mark>What if surfaces are the real sites for the generation of meaning?</mark></p>
<footer>Tim Ingold, “Surface Visions” in <cite lang="en"><a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/tcsa/34/7-8" target="_blank" rel="external noreferrer">Theory, Culture & Society</a></cite>, vol. 34, Nº 7-8, 2017, p. 100</footer>
</blockquote>
<p><figure class="Figure invertable">
<img
loading="lazy"
src="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/153/interface-invertable.png"
alt="What happens singularly at the interface level?"
title="Interface"
class="Figure__img"
/>
<figcaption class="Figure__caption">
<strong class="Figure__title">Interface</strong>
<p>
What happens singularly at the interface level?
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>Rather than skipping surfaces under the pretext of a noumenal investigation (according to the Kantian distinction between noumen and phenomen, between the “essential” thing and its accidental manifestation) or by despising “appearances” (which chimera, deception and <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/062.html">illusion</a> are frequently associated to), Ingold suggests investing them in all their depth:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is not a disguise but a revelation.
…
Far from hiding the depths <em>behind</em> the surface, it allows us to feel the depths <em>in</em> the surface.</p>
<footer>Tim Ingold, p. 104</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Surfaces—allowing discourse, exchange, dialog—become particularly meaningful not only because they participate directly in constructing relationships with people, objects, the world (through visualization, programming, communication interfaces…) <mark>but because they constitute in themselves the critical locus where meaning emerges</mark>.
It is precisely at the level of interfaces that thought is enunciated (we think with <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/134.html">cognitive interfaces</a>), that social life becomes animated and <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/141.html">interlaced</a>, that a world takes form.</p>
<details>
<summary>Text interfaces in Marc Augé’s non-places</summary>
<p>Of plain banality, <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/144.html">non-places</a> may however induce significant behaviour.
Worse even, they generate, sometimes massively, the <em>absence</em> of meaning.
Anthropologist Marc Augé takes note of the case of textual interfaces, like the screen of banking and transaction devices which make implacable “calls to order,” or all those signs that fabricate the “average man”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Another example of the invasion of space by text is the big supermarket.
The customer wanders round in silence, reads labels, weighs fruit and vegetables on a machine that gives the price along with the weight; then hands his credit card to a young woman as silent as himself – anyway, not very chatty – who runs each article past the sensor of a decoding machine before checking the validity of the customer’s credit card.
There is a more direct but even more silent dialogue between the cardholder and the cash dispenser: he inserts the card, then reads the instructions on its screen, generally encouraging in tone but sometimes including phrases (‘Card faulty’, ‘Please withdraw your card’, ‘Read instructions carefully’) that call him rather sternly to order.
All the remarks that emanate from our roads and commercial centres, from the street-corner sites of the vanguard of the banking system (‘Thank you for your custom’, ‘Bon voyage’, ‘We apologize for any inconvenience’) are addressed simultaneously and indiscriminately to each and any of us: <mark>they fabricate the ‘average man’</mark>, defined as the user of the road, retail or banking system.</p>
<footer>Marc Augé, <cite>Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity</cite>, 1995, pp. 99-100</footer>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Interface design</strong>, among others, participates critically not only in making what objects or systems wear, but more concretely in building the relationships that they allow, and therefore partake of a particular epistemology (objects, <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/030.html">code</a>, are never free of bias).</p>
</details>Program: Inscription & Artefact2023-04-10T14:20:00+00:002023-04-10T14:20:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/154<p>What is a program?</p>
<p>Originally, a program is a substantive meaning a particular inscription <em lang="grc">programma</em>, literally “what is written in advance,” hence, “agenda, inscription.” It is derived from <em lang="grc">prographein</em>, “writing before, header of; to post, or display (which can also be a public notice, an edict that has been posted).</p>
<p>A program is created with intent, which is initially <strong>prospective</strong> (announcing the detail of an event, a musical unrolling, an architectural plan), at times <strong>technical</strong> (instructions given to a machine), but can also (and simultaneously) be <strong>artistic</strong> (as in Donald Knuth’s “literate programming” or Lev Manovich’s “cultural analytics” which integrate cultural approaches to quantitative methods).</p>
<p>The term “program” is plurivocal, depending on the context:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The term has developed didactic uses in art, economics, architecture and music with the basic meaning, “set of conditions to fulfill, constraints to be respected.”<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Among its many meanings, a program first designates an <strong>inscription</strong>, a <strong>scriptural artefact</strong> (from the first definition given by the Académie française: “leaf, book, poster”<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup>).
Since it is an inscription, it is thus a <strong>material object</strong>, an <strong>artefact</strong> because it is the product of a particular human activity (thus marked by an intention) comprising eventual imperfections (accidents or unforeseen events encountered during an experiment)—such is the double meaning of “artefact.”<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup></p>
<p>An artefact is necessarily programmatic: it states an intention because of its inscription (any inscription being provided with, by definition, an intention<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup>); it responds to a need; it makes thinking operative, executable.</p>
<p>This inscription may take various material forms: an advertising placard, a book stating the intentions of a political project, instructions given to a machine (starting with the first half of the 20th century, punch cards are used to physically support programs).<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">5</a></sup></p>
<p>In short, a program is an artefact; and because of its scriptural (or “inscriptional”) character, it is an intentional object.</p>
<h2 id="why-read-programs">Why read programs?</h2>
<p>Programs are objects for reading, inscriptions for interpretation, artefacts for analysis.</p>
<p>One can try to <strong>identify programs</strong> embedded within objects, <strong>reconstruct the intentions</strong> of which they are the materialization (be it the form of a chair, the design of a building or a computer algorithm), but also <strong>make other possible programs emerge</strong>, <em>i.e.</em> to reveal their “artefactual” dimension, likely to produce non-determinate effects (like photography in Walter Benjamin’s works). Logics of diversion appear significant in a world conditioned by “programs” of all sorts (economical, political, biological, but also algorithmic in the context of ubiquitous computing), characterized by a rationalized reduction of the possible futures. Reading the world is also about reading the programs (objects, discourse, intentions, writings) that shape it.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><strong>Program</strong>: the historic note is from Alain Rey (dir.), <cite lang="fr">Dictionnaire historique de la langue française</cite>, sixth ed., vol. 3, Paris, Le Robert, 2022. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p><strong>Leaf, book, poster</strong>: from the <cite lang="fr">Dictionnaire de l’Académie française</cite>, tome 3, 9th ed., 1992. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p><strong>Artefact</strong>: the idea comes from a personal conversation with Antoine Fauchié on March 30, 2023. <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:4">
<p><strong>Inscriptions and intention</strong>: Bruno Bachimont notes that inscriptions are at once material and intentional objects.
“Concrete by their materiality shaped by the technique, abstract by the interpretations of which they are the object and in view of which they are carried out, the inscriptions are cultural and <em>intentional</em> objects insofar as they do not exist for their physical properties (energy, force, material structure), but for the interpretation of which they will be able to be the object and which will make it possible to transmit or find a content of thought or knowledge.” (Bruno Bachimont, <cite>Ingénierie des connaissances et des contenus</cite>, 2007, p. 43) <a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:5">
<p><strong>Punch cards</strong>: previous programming systems, implemented in the 18th century (well before the advent of electronics) for loom models and later for calculating machines, used systems of punch cards or ribbons, which Robert Ligonnière shows in <cite lang="fr">Préhistoire et histoire des ordinateurs : des origines du calcul aux premiers calculateurs électroniques</cite>, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1987. <a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Alter-Digital?2023-10-07T21:15:00+00:002023-10-07T21:15:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/155<p>In a short essay titled <cite lang="fr">Contre l’alternumérisme</cite> (which could be translated into English as “Against alter-digital”) published in 2023, Julia Laïnae and Nicolas Alep offer a critique of the contemporary sociotechnical system.</p>
<p>What is alter-digital?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We thought it was important to bring attention on the inconsistency and the conformism of the different alt-digital movements. And although there was, in the early 2000s, an alter-globalization—the hope for a different globalization, a fairer and more brotherly one, than the one imposed by the actors of capitalism—<mark>a form of alt-digitalization</mark> is emerging, at the turn of the 2020s.</p>
<footer>Laïnae & Alep, 2023, p. 25</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>A return of yesterday’s alter-globalization, <strong>alter-digital</strong> (according to the authors) refers to attitudes longing for a better way of making “the digital,”<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> using different means than the dominant technologies (by opposing against privatized and centralized, <abbr class="acronym" title="Acronym: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc.">GAFAM</abbr>-like platforms, the proliferation of connected objects, surveillance capitalism, etc.).</p>
<h2 id="doing-better-with-the-digital">Doing better with the digital</h2>
<p>Many voices are raised in order to “do better” with digital technology: <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/066.html">free and open source software</a>, participative platforms with a horizontal governance, decentralized and federated applications, so-called eco-friendly design, and so on.
The fundamental problem lies in the initial proposition: it’s all about <strong>continuing to do things with the digital</strong>, along with the environmental, social, political and economic consequences that such responses entail<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><mark>Alt-digitalization does not allow us to address the political issues of our time.</mark> It merely anesthetizes us, fostering the illusion that it is possible to live fully connected while the planet burns; and that this connection is the only possible way to cultivate our social relations and facilitate the processes of collective emancipation.</p>
<footer>Laïnae & Alep, 2023, p. 133</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Not settling for a simply “different” use of digital technology (albeit a more “virtuous” one), the essay commands learning<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup> to do <em>without the digital</em>, period.</p>
<h2 id="doing-better-without-the-digital">Doing better <em>without</em> the digital</h2>
<p>Whether a solution should be used rather than another one <em>(between free software or a commercially built solution, for example)</em>, the mistake lies in the systematic assumption that a computer is required.
Such an assumption contributes to an important technician bias: rather than reflecting on the source of the problem or proposing a genuinely sustainable change, one relies on a form of <strong>technological solutionism</strong>.
This attitude has dangerous effects:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>it removes the ordinary citizen’s sense of responsibility</strong>, since improving the <em>living-togetherness</em> (<em lang="fr">vivre-ensemble</em>) becomes the job of a limited group of experts, a certain intellectual, but especially entrepreneurial and technician “<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/117.html">elite</a>”;</li>
<li><strong>it “disconnects” the individual or the collectivity from a particular technology</strong>: it becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to repair an everyday object, like a connected coffee maker which relies on micro-electronics in order to function; a large corporation becomes the only one able of governing a private platform or repairing <em>(when this is not rendered impossible through deliberate sabotaging)</em> the devices it sells.</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="a-criticism-that-cannot-be-accepted">A criticism that cannot be accepted?</h2>
<p>Digital technologies occupy such a place <em>(in Western societies, at least)</em> that a return to a pre-digital world appears utterly unrealistic.
Such a radical turn is actually what the essay suggests: not a more modest or reduced use, but the <strong>radical non-use</strong> of digital technologies.</p>
<p>This is the strength of the essay, which is an invitation to reflect on <em>what such a decline could represent</em>; one must, however, accept to consider it even so little as a possibility.
What has become some sort of widely accepted obviousness, an injunction <em>(doing with the digital)</em> evolves into a question <em>(doing without the digital?)</em>, enabling one to envision the world differently.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><strong>“The digital”</strong>: “The digital” (a less usual wording in English than its French counterpart) is a catch-all term which refers to a very broad set of very different things (an app to learn languages, a continuously updated bus schedule in a terminal, an autonomous hydroponics system for growing lettuce, a government platform, an interface for controlling a military drone, etc.). It is usually unfair to treat it as a homogenous phenomenon, or even as a singular term, since it is eminently plural and affects all areas of society. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p><strong>Consequences of digital technology</strong>: Digital technologies entail undeniable consequences which are often hidden by corporations responsible for their large-scale deployment. The essay (which should be read as such, and not as a scientific paper) offers several examples of the absurdity of the contemporary use of digital technology, such as electronic shower knobs supposed to limit an individual’s water consumption (the extraction and manufacturing of electronic chips require enormous amounts of water, occurring in countries where local populations suffer from lack of access to clean water) questions not only the bottom line results, but also <em>to whom</em> benefits the markets of such objects. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p><strong>Learning (with the digital)</strong>: Perhaps paradoxically, doing <em>without</em> the digital implies a <strong>minimal understanding</strong> of it; otherwise, critical rejection of a given technology (or the conscious adoption of it) can only take place under a veil of ignorance (blind technophobia or unbridled technophilia). All technology has an impact on its <em lang="fr">milieu</em> and the communities around it. A minimal level of <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/133.html">technological literacy</a> is essential to ensure the necessary conditions for <strong>living together</strong>, enabling a dialogue between the different parts of a community. <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Software Inebriation2023-11-04T00:10:00+00:002023-11-04T00:10:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/156<p>In a 1995 text titled <cite>A Plea for Lean Software</cite>, computer scientist Niklaus Wirth reiterates the problem of the increasing complexity of software, as a result of the unbridled integration of functionality and, in particular, a faulty culture of design.
Wirth cites, “with a touch of humour,” the “law” proposed by Martin Reiser<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What explains this?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A primary cause for complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want. Any incompatibility with the original system concept is either ignored or passes unrecognized, which renders the design more complicated and its use more cumbersome.</p>
<footer>Niklaus Wirth, p. 65</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Such an attitude, consisting in “uncritically” adding new functionality that substantially increases the complexity of a system and its energy consumption (but also adds to its necessary maintenance, regarding security, consistency, legal conformity, etc.), has harmful <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/155.html">consequences</a>, such as <mark>the accelerating obsolescence of hardware</mark>.
If computers appear to “slow down” with time, this phenomenon must be nuanced: it is the increase in load imposed on the same computing capacity that creates such impression.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Uncontrolled software growth has also been accepted because customers have trouble distinguishing between essential features and those that are just “nice to have.” Example of the latter class: those arbitrarily overlapping windows suggested by the uncritically but widely adopted desktop metaphor; and fancy icons decorating the screen display, such as antique mailboxes and garbage cans that are further enhanced by the visible movement of selected items toward their ultimate destination. These details are cute but not essential, and they have a hidden cost.</p>
<footer>Niklaus Wirth, p. 64-65</footer>
</blockquote>
<h2 id="methodical-design-as-a-remedy-to-software-inebriation">Methodical design as a remedy to software inebriation</h2>
<p>“Software inebriation”<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup> suggests lacuna in judgment or design.
The steady increase of computing power in generations of computers (correlating with Moore’s law<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup>) has the effect of removing pressure on the quality of writing (software code in this instance):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Bill Gates made a similar observation, but said that the net result is to keep system speed about the same, not to get worse. Gates speculates that this is for more than one reason: programmers add more and more features but also code less and less efficiently as hardware grows in capability. Worrying less about the efficiency of software makes the software less costly to produce. This is an example of how Moore’s law can enable trade-offs that save costs in areas of computing other than chip technology. <mark>Many applications and operating systems now contain tens of millions of lines of software as a side effect of Moore’s law.</mark></p>
<footer>Gustafson, 2011</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>The key or “price to pay” (as Wirth writes) lies in <strong>methodical design</strong>, which is insightful (integrating diverse considerations, not just related to engineering itself), disciplined (adhering rigorously to established principles), progressive (thanks to thoughtful decomposition), iterative (through successive rounds).
This kind of rigour is, however, often bypassed by market imperatives, such as short-term profit seeking.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Methodical design, for example, is apparently undesirable because products so developed take too much “time to market.” Analytical verification and correctness-proof techniques fare even worse; in addition, these methods require a higher intellectual caliber than that required by the customary “try and fix it” approach.
…
When “everything goes” is the modus operandi, methodologies and disciplines are the first casualties.</p>
<footer>Niklaus Wirth, p. 66</footer>
</blockquote>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><strong>Reiser’s law</strong>: Wirth explicitly wished to address the problem stated by Martin Reiser in his project Oberon (an operating system): “Compactness and regular structure, and due attention to efficient implementation of important details appear to be the key to economical software engineering. With the Oberon System, we wish to refute Reiser’s Law, which has been confirmed by virtually all recent releases of operating systems: In spite of great leaps forward, hardware is becoming faster more slowly than software is becoming slower.” <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p><strong>Inebriation</strong>: Wirth uses the expression “fat software,” which connotes the idea of excessive weight; the term “inebriation” (perhaps closer to the French equivalent than “drunkenness”) rather emphasizes on the transient cognitive state involved in the process. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p><strong>Moore’s law</strong>: Gordon E. Moore (in his 1965 article) observed, and foresaw, that the density of manufactured processing chips would continue to increase by a factor of two every two years. This tendency was effectively realized over the following decades and even after the 2000s. It is interesting to note the feedback loop that resulted from the law: as the available computing power increased (thanks to smaller and more powerful chips), the demand in computing tasks followed, in a mad race where each one would exchange the lead (computing power would be caught up, then get ahead again, and so on). See John L. Gustafson, “Moore’s Law” in David Padua (ed.) <cite>Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing</cite>, Springer, New York, 2011, <a href="https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4_81">https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4_81</a>. <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Bloatware2023-11-15T22:45:00+00:002023-11-15T22:45:00+00:00Louis-Olivier Brassardlouis@loupbrun.cahttps://www.loupbrun.cahttps://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/157<p>In her 2000 text, researcher Joanna McGrenere discusses “bloated” software and the attitude responsible for it, “creeping featurism.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Recently, there has been interest in the popular press and the computer world in what has been termed <mark>“bloat” or “bloatware” and “creeping featurism”</mark>. The term “bloat” has existed in the technical community for some time; software bloat has been defined as “the result of adding new features to a program or system to the point where the benefit of the new features is outweighed by the impact on the technical resources (e.g., RAM, disk space or performance) and complexity of use". Creeping featurism is the tendency to complicate a system by adding features in an ad-hoc, non-systematic manner.</p>
<footer>Joanna McGrenere, <cite>"Bloat": The Objective and Subjective Dimensions</cite>, 2000</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>The paradigmatic case study used by McGrenere is the word processing “bloatware” Microsoft Word.
Users have a myriad of buttons and functions at their disposal, but only a fraction is used, and the functionality used differs from one user to another.</p>
<p>Wendy Hui Kyong Chun underlines the absurdity which consists in planning all the possible uses of given software:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The mad attempt to prescribe and anticipate every desire of the user produces a massive feature mountain whose potential interaction sequences mean that a user’s actions cannot be completely determined in advance: the more features the program provides, <mark>the more possibilities for the user to act unpredictably</mark>.</p>
<footer>Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, "Programmability" in Matthew Fuller (ed.) <cite lang="en">Software Studies: A Lexicon</cite>, 2008, p. 227</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>Such unpredictability on the user’s end increases the global complexity and entropy of a system.</p>
<p>Button-based interfaces change the relationship towards writing, thinking and communicating.
They directly affect the <strong>meaning-making</strong> production through particular paradigms and frameworks, and may also induce excessive complexity.
This is not to say visual interfaces are either good or bad; rather, we should probably look at them as a <a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/en/n/153.html">potential locus</a> for debate and interpretation, since they also play a significant role in discourse.</p>