Читать книгу The Contributory Revolution - Pierre Giorgini - Страница 20

The term conception is used here in the sense of the “way of perceiving” a reality, an idea or a system. It is an act of creating intelligibility, in the etymological sense: “intus legere”, to connect the interior. It allows the human brain to memorize and apprehend a perceived reality by inserting it into a system of mental representations, a reality on which thought locates and operates rules, concepts and classifications.

The notion of system here refers to a set of entities that interact with each other, producing a collective or “systemic” phenomenon correlated to this interaction. The act of bringing intelligibility or the “way of observing” will then be exercised by conferring to the system a structure of forms and operating principles, describable within a set of norms and formal concepts conveyed by a language (the system of representation). Particuarly in the field of science, major dualities appear in the ways of conceiving these objects, especially those that make up a “system”.

From a structural point of view, there are two opposing conceptions. On the one hand, the corpuscular or atomistic conceptions (in entities, in places, in identified objects with minimal stability, with a membrane, with a well-differentiated inside and outside) and, on the other hand, the tissue conceptions, diffuse, non-localized or structures of links (vibrations, energy, waves). The notions of scale and the position of the intervening party creating the “way of observing” the system, as well as the way in which someone intervenes in the system, apply across these dualities.

A new duality then arises according to whether the intervening party is an entity that is exogenous or endogenous to the system and whether they contribute to the system from within it (endo-contributive – ENC) or distribute their actions and artifacts from outside of it (exo-distributive – EXD). It will be seen that the relationship of the intervening party with a corpuscular design system can be endo-contributive or exo-distributive, or even a combination of the two depending on the scale, whereas in the case of fully tissue-based, diffuse designs, it can only be endo-contributive, itself not being confined to a compact entity. It is possible to generalize these principles by considering the intervening party in a broad sense: human, technical system, biological, artificial intelligence, organization, formalism.

So, in summary, in the first case, a particular entity external to the system produces and distributes its contributions to the global system (exo-distributive), whereas in the second case, each entity of the system, reduced to an ephemeral density of links for the tissue conception, produces its contributions and, through their networking, globally contributes to the functioning of the whole (endo-contributive). This duality is also observable for the activity of “intelligence” production whose contribution to the system is an activity of analysis, data storage, decisions, coordination or calculation. In the distributive case, “intelligence” is concentrated in an external centralized entity, and then the results or decisions are distributed or give rise to organized coordination from a central point. In the contributory case, the intelligence is distributed in the system and it is its networking that creates an intelligence of the complex system. This migration towards intelligence produced in a more contributory and shared way, less centralized and distributive, is concretely translated in all the observable mutations of organizations, including that of democratic intelligence (co-elaborative democracy). We will see that the epistemological migration that we are experiencing (the change of episteme as understood by Michel Foucault (1966)) makes us migrate from a dominant conception where the place (status, place, etc.) prevails and determines the network of links, to conceptions where it is the structure of links that determines the conception of places.