Читать книгу The Contributory Revolution - Pierre Giorgini - Страница 7

Preface

My first two books, La transition fulgurante (“The Lightning Transition”) and La fulgurante recréation (“The Lightning Recreation”), describe the systemic upheaval we are experiencing on a global scale. The work comes after the combination of a powerful and large-scale technoscientific transition with the massive emergence of the interwoven and “co-elaborative” mode of conceiving cooperation within complex systems (technical and human). According to these two books, it is the source of a true anthropological revolution.

The third book, Au crépuscule des lieux (“At the Twilight of Places”), describes how this metamorphosis led to a generalized deconstruction of locality in the broad sense: the status of “taking place” in space and time, as well as psychological, symbolic and social place. It also shows how these deconstructions were generating, before our eyes, a quest for meaning, providing its own solution: the reconstruction of new places of meaning. These third places in the reinvention of the world were presented in this third work as well as in the fourth, published in 2020, La Crise de la joie (“The Crisis of Joy”), as a source of hope and joy.

However, I remained dissatisfied, because this demonstration remained centered on the analysis of the symptoms and did not focus enough on the epistemological sources of this upheaval. My question was then: “What underlying mutations in the process of building knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, were underpinning this transformation?”

Jérôme Vignon, in the preface to La transition fulgurante, opened his remarks on the need to deal with this question by describing the upheaval in question as an epistemological revolution. Bertrand Vergely, in the preface to Au crépuscule des lieux, referred to Michel Foucault‘s (1966) “épistémè” to identify what he thought underlay my approach. The concept of episteme, according to Foucault, highlights the existence of a “frame of thought of an era”, which permeates the sciences as well as culture (philosophy, arts, lifestyles). This prompted me to approach, modestly and in part, the work of this great thinker. And the required effort led me to reread the concepts of my three works, going deeper into questioning the source of everything: “How is science developed as a cultural object?” Also, conversely, “How do the systemic upheavals of the world modify science and through it, the whole cultural field?” And, finally, “How far does the metamorphosis in such a development suggest a potentially beneficial approach to individual and collective learning?”

Then an image came to mind, that of a river flowing into a sea of joyful and renewed hope. It would be a question of identifying the topological displacement of its bed by coloring the water of its source in order to better describe the new path taken. Thus, my hope would be renewed and I would feel a sense and joy, feeling again able to identify what doing the right thing means “here and now”. Because the river, like life and the living world, is a single flow subject to the rules of time and also a timeless whole. The Jordan of the Bible is no longer quite the Jordan of today; however, it remains the Jordan because people, by naming it, have endowed it with much more than the sum of all its physical and chemical characteristics.

June 2021