READING THE PRESENT

By Pierre Lévy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada

Our everyday life is changing at a frightening pace. Do we still live in reality, or in a hyper-reality? What is becoming of truth? Has the present, reverberating through our networks, devoured duration itself and the very notion of temporal perspective? Are we condemned to an interactive solitude in which AIs will know us better than anyone else does? Are we entering a post-natural society?

How are we to understand what is happening to us? What is this anthropological mutation that lifts us like an immense wave whose size and duration escape us? It is easier to fear it or admire it than to describe it with accuracy. Three dangers lie in wait for the interpreter: a periodization focused on the immediate present and the pressure of the news cycle; a one-dimensional or mono-causal description; an irresponsible ethico-practical attitude.

As for periodization, let us set the present situation of communication back within the long history of media. The birth and development of the printing press — the mechanical reproduction of symbols — was accompanied by a first anthropological mutation that unfolded over five centuries. Let us recall its principal aspects: the revolution of the mathematical and experimental sciences of nature; the industrial revolution; the emergence of the nation-state as a new political form; the relegation of religious transcendence to the « private sphere » in favor of an autonomous human reason and of this-worldly promises of salvation (liberalism, socialism, and so on).

We now live at the beginning of a new phase of transformation that started about 125 years ago — five or six generations. The electrification of symbols took flight at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: from electric lighting to the talking picture, from FM radio to satellite television, innovations followed one another and spread rapidly across the planet, creating for the first time in history a real-time communication field encompassing the whole of humanity. After the revolution of the Web, the smartphone, and social media, the majority of the world’s population is now connected. Finally, at the summit of a pyramid of material infrastructures, data centers, and software standards, AI now places at everyone’s disposal the world’s memory, autonomous software agents, and an omnipresent social mediation. None of this would have been possible had symbols — words, images, texts, rules, games — not been encoded into elementary particles (waves, photons, electrons, quarks) capable of instantaneous transmission, unlimited recording, and processing at the speed of light. Each stage belongs to one and the same transgenerational movement, the conquest of the world of culture by electricity, carrying us to the point we have now reached. Once this historical movement is intuitively grasped, we sense that the anthropological transformation will continue — not only on the technical plane, but also in terms of the adaptation and reinvention of institutions and modes of thought.

To understand the mutation under way, it would be a mistake to focus on media alone. The period running from the early twentieth century to today is also characterized by a series of transformations intersecting with those of communication: demographic growth, urbanization, mass literacy, repeated world wars. Finally, these last 125 years, with their technical, economic, and demographic progress, have increased our species’ impact on the biosphere and triggered, in return, a growing awareness of our responsibilities toward Gaia, the living earth that sustains us.

Since the theme of this short text is reading the present, let me raise here the question of meaning. The electrification of symbols has altered the modes of interpretation in several ways. The growing availability of information, the acceleration of communications, the new powers of propaganda and advertising, and the mental impregnation of populations by the entertainment and cognition industries have all affected the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. The electronic revolution arrives at a moment when the long chains of transmission are interrupted or badly compromised. Demographic explosion, rapid urbanization, the secondary and higher schooling of generations born to illiterate or poorly educated parents, the thunderous export of European — now global — ideologies into milieus foreign to the anthropology forged by Christianity and the Enlightenment: all of this contributes to the crisis of meaning we have inherited today.

Alongside the world war that began in 1914, a war of hermeneutics also raged. This is why we cannot interpret the present as though it had not taken place. In the aftermath of the First World War, totalitarian movements arose from remarkably similar conditions: the collapse of empires, identity-based resentments, economic crises, the breakdown of transmission. Leninist communism, fascism, Nazism, and Islamism all shared the same revolutionary fervor and the same monotone mode of interpretation: everything — from present reality to historical tradition — is read through a single, true grid that names an enemy and aims at victory. The goal is to conquer one institutional position after another (including the university and the media) and to acquire cultural hegemony, until power itself is finally seized. For all these currents, the consciousness of the masses is false, alienated, manipulated — and the monotone interpretation of the vanguard deserves to be spread by every means, using the most advanced technical and psychological methods available.

Against automatic condemnations, against single-key reading grids, against monotone interpretations that see in history either a promise of salvation or a threat of apocalypse, let us set a polyphonic hermeneutics. Let us allow ourselves to be addressed by tradition and by the works of the canon, rather than dismissing them as expressions of domination, metaphysics, or ignorance. A living, open relationship with the past allows us not only to read the present as its continuation, but also to appreciate what is genuinely new in it and to risk unprecedented explanations. By affixing to new objects ready-made conceptual labels, inherited from theories devised in other contexts to annihilate enemies long since gone, we would condemn ourselves to not understanding the present at all. Let us humbly acknowledge that our own consciousness is just as situated and « alienated » — if one insists on the word — as that of the subjects we study.

If we — researchers, intellectuals, teachers — wish to read the present in an ethical and responsible manner, we must restore a dialogue with tradition, with our objects of study, and with our contemporaries. Genuine dialogue presupposes a recognition of the hermeneutic autonomy of authors, social groups, and historical epochs. We do not know better than they do what they truly think, or what they ought to think — even when we claim to speak in the name of totality, of the historical movement, of the being that destines us, or of critical theory. A production of meaning that is lived and durable, however situated it may be, is no less true or legitimate within its own domain of validity. We must learn to inhabit virtually the universes of meaning produced by others, rather than disqualifying them. But once that work is done, let us assume our own interpretation, our own version of reason and truth, without letting ourselves be intimidated by the sirens of denunciation.

After the exponential growth of recent centuries, we are about to experience a brutal demographic decline, with the negative economic consequences that inevitably follow. Scientific and technical breakthroughs will accelerate. The world war and the hermeneutic battles will continue. The face-to-face encounter with Gaia will deepen. The civilization of the future will draw out all the consequences — still unforeseeable — of stigmergic interhuman communication in the digital sphere, of every brain’s connection to the planetary hypercortex, and of the distributed control of the technocosm by robotic agents. The humanist in me wonders how personal and collective reflexivity, the interiority of the person, and the modes of production of meaning will be redefined. For all of this depends on cultural evolution. Reflexive thought, personal interiority, and interpretation have always depended on the historical totalities within which the practico-technical, ethico-political, intellectual, and aesthetic dimensions recursively determine one another. What will become of them in the future? Who are we in the process of becoming? But let us be reassured: as long as we go on being born, loving, suffering, dying, and searching for meaning, society will not become « post-natural. » And because this reflection on artificialization itself partakes of what it describes, I thank the AI that advised me to shorten my original text.