Labyrinths of Information

“WHOEVER tried one day to enter Internet knows that one would not have to speak about ‘autoroutes’ of information but rather about labyrinths: gigantic tangle of lanes and dead ends, libraries and coffees, the network is composed of thousand paths which often finish in dead ends. Internet resembles more the labyrinth of a medieval city, without true architect, than with the beautiful scheduling of a motorway. Admittedly, as the motorways have done it for fifty years, Internet will play a major role in the future of the communications between the men. But it will not be of races along straight lines but about voyages buissonniers, virtual, motionless, which returns there still to the labyrinth, show of voyage.

“For a long time, the major metaphor to indicate progress was the straight line, better means of saving energy. And it is undoubtedly for that that the word of motorway came to mind when it was a question of naming the networks multimedia in gestation. But this metaphor is anachronistic and misleading: in the universe of information reigns complexity; it is not a question any more of saving energy but of producing and of transmitting information. And in this paradigm, the simple one is not best. The Master word of the modern society will become that of labyrinth. All, in our companies, takes the form of it. Initially, data processing is labyrinthian: the microprocessor is like a labyrinth of chips; the succession of binary instructions of the data-processing programs must be read like a succession of choice to borrow such or such path.

“The video games also consist in them traversing a labyrinth without falling into the multiple traps which are hidden there; they, in their most recent versions, are even connected on the networks and make it possible to play with partners, in labyrinths of labyrinths. More still, if one thinks of it well, the majority of the elements of the modern life return there. The city is a labyrinth; the networks of capacities and influence, the flow charts, the university courses, the careers in the company, are also made by it of a succession of traps and choices binary. The genetic engineering is still presented in the form of a creation of a series of coded labyrinths. The fingerprint is a specific labyrinth to each individual. Until the psychoanalysis which indicates the unconscious one like a monster tapi at the bottom of a labyrinth and which is given as object to include/understand the dreams where the sleeper is confronted with the choice distressing of a path to take in a maze of interdicts. It is necessary for us thus to learn how to think labyrinth.

“For that, it is necessary to turn over to the sources: the labyrinth is one of the oldest figures of the human thought. It was, in the most moved back times, the best way of trapping time, of preventing the profaners from approaching a tomb or a crowned place. Something like a code of safe; a space and mental code, a ritual of passage. One found some, everywhere: in Egypt, in China, in India, in Tibet, in Greece, in Brittany, in America, in Africa. Sometimes with the same drawings to thousands of kilometers. They were stones, plants or simply engraved or painted on walls. In Egypt, they represented the path followed by the heart. In the Mediterranean, they were used as guides with ritual dances. In all the cultures, they symbolized the interior voyage of one man in the search of his truth, virtual nomadism.

“With modernity, the nomad leaves the place to the sedentary; the labyrinth disappears with the profit from the straight line. It takes refuge in the gardens of convents where it is nothing any more but one elegant way to make it possible faithful to make, with few expenses, a show of crusade, while circulating in a labyrinth of which center MIME Jerusalem. One also finds it in the English gardens like a virtual nomadism, parlour game always, this ludic time.

“And it is back today, for close reasons: as for the motionless pilgrim of the convents, the modern labyrinths transform the man into a virtual nomad, traveller of the image and show, who works and consumes in residence, travelling in networks of information, if it does not have the means of being this nomad of luxury, traveller of all the pleasures, who tomorrow will dictate his values with the middle class. Then, it will be necessary for us to relearn the secrecies of this old wisdom, to study all the strategies making it possible to draw them and not to lose itself there, founded on the intuition and the memory. It will be necessary for us to relearn to see the world starting from this metaphor. For example, it will have to be understood that time does not pass in a single direction but only it is spread out, like water in a labyrinth, with outward journeys and returns, spirals and dead ends, proximities remote and misleading distances.

“In this universe, the myths will have to say much; and initially obviously that of Crétois which made labyrinth the place of dissimulation of cruelty. Who will be Minos, the capacity which wants to hide its secrecies in the labyrinth? Who will be Thésée, which wants to reveal them? And does ARIANE, rebel it, which gives him the wire for the love of the life? And Maze, the brilliant inventor of the trap only able to thwart it? And Minotaure, the dream, the monster, the unconscious one, the enemy hidden in each man, that it is necessary for him to put at the day to destroy it? And Icare, démiurge, who, to escape from the labyrinth, use the wings developed by his father, wise Dédale, but which will go up too high and will fall? What will be finally the wax, size and limit of the human intelligence, because it enables him to fix wings has its shoulders and to escape the labyrinth by the top, at least as a long time as it does not try to approach too much the sun? Of Maze with Internet. Very far. And very near. Exactly like two points close to a labyrinth.

“Jacques Attali, former special adviser near the president of the Republic François Mitterrand, former president of the BERD, is to advise of State. Source: newspaper the World, Thursday November 9, 1995, p. 18

“Placed on the server of Synec-Doc. with the pleasant authorization of Jacques Attali and the newspaper the World.”

Text stream translated from the French through Altavista's Babelfish.

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