Érudit's RSS Feed

In Memoriam – Guy Rocher 1924-2025

Daniel Dagenais, Caroline Larue and Michel Lalonde

La transition a déjà eu lieu…

Claude Leduc, Eric Martin and Maxime Ouellet

Cybernétique et philosophie : contribution à la généalogie de la thanatocratie

Jean Vioulac
The contemporary universality of scientific knowledge conceals its precise historical origin in ancient Greece: the project of philosophy was to establish λόγος as a principle of universal governance. With the advent of computer science, formal logic has conquered an executive power over material devices: λόγος has thus become software. The contemporary advent of artificial intelligence and algorithmic regulation completes the total submission of human lives to the abstraction of an intelligible universe that Plato himself identified with death. Cyberne- tics accomplishes the nihilism inherent in philosophy and establishes the power of thanatocracy.

La cybernétique et ses glissements sémantiques. Étude sur une néosémie généralisée

Baptiste Rappin
The author studies cybernetic language by examining more closely the generalization of the semantic neologism, also called neosemy. After addressing the concepts of “information”, “finality”, “autonomy”, and “system”, he offers a more in-depth analysis of the category of “intelligence” due to the relevance of generative artificial intelligence. The last part is devoted to highlighting and examining the mechanisms and issues of the observed semantic shift.

La dialectique de la raison algorithmique

Maxime Ouellet
Drawing on Critical Theory, initially developed by the Frankfurt School, this article aims to grasp the sociohistorical foundations of the central categories underlying artificial intelligence: communication, command, control, and information. We will first situate the development of artificial intelligence within the context of early work in cybernetics, specifically within what was then termed state monopoly capitalism. We will then explore whether contemporary transformations of capitalism, made possible by advances in artificial intelligence such as machine learning and deep learning, challenge the possibility of developing a critical theory of society.

Le mythe d’une IA responsable : ou combien de temps l’IA responsable pourra-t-elle encore prétendre être autre chose que la consécration de notre devenir‑irresponsable ?

Eric Martin
Contrary to expectations, the AI industry is not hostile to political regulation. On the contrary, it is very proactive in the regulatory sphere. A great deal of media hype surrounding the civilizational risks associated with AI pressures states to quickly commit to producing regulatory frameworks in order, it is claimed, to ensure that AI deve- lopment carries on safely and for the benefit of societies. This discourse constitutes a case of “regulatory capture”, meaning that the industry finds ways to invest and control the field of normative production and defines the content of future guidelines. Furthermore, the discourse surrounding the production of safe and responsible AI is meant to generate and maintain the confidence of investors and of the public, thus enabling the continued development of AI. However, societies should not be fooled by the rhetoric promoting responsible AI. This discourse obscures the development of a fundamental and comprehensive critique of the capitalist and cybernetic society- system. It also avoids discussing how communities can regain the capacity to set genui- ne political boundaries capable of ensuring the future of the world, rather than allowing capitalist systems and organizations to shape reality from the outset.

La finitude électrique. Qu’est-ce qui fait penser l’IA ?

Sébastien Mussi
This essay offers (with the help of several authors such as Annie Le Brun, Monette Vacquin, J.-F. Lyotard, Hannah Arendt...) a short reflexive journey about artificial intelligence and its implications concerning imagination, thinking and about the phantasm that it tries to make real. The author of this essay puts forward that what is at stake is not intelligence as much as imagination, sensitivity and excess.

L’automatisation de l’imaginaire : sur l’art à l’ère de l’intelligence artificielle

Claude Leduc
This article analyzes the evolution of the relationship between art and technology since the height of modernism in order to critique the meaning attributed to digital technologies, in particular generative artificial intelligence, within contemporary art. It was Walter Benjamin who, somewhat unwittingly, best grasped the moment when technics imposed its own modes of operation on symbolic expression; a transformation that perfectly coincided with the joint systemic dissolution of autonomous art and the artist-subject stemming from the new cybernetic categories of the post-war avant-garde. Postmodern art will positively reinterpret Benjamin’s theses by establishing the theoretical and pragmatic foundations defining its relationship to new digital technologies. By obscuring the dialectics between the categories of artistic practice and the abstraction of capital, the post-humanist-inspired currents in contemporary art have come to naturalize technology. From this perspective, contemporary art is merely at the forefront of the broader phenomenon of machine fetishism within advanced capitalist societies, a trend most clearly observed in the anthropomorphisation of AI in artistic practices. This reduction of the individual to the status of a machine is a precondition for the automation of the socio-cultural imaginary by generative AI, the moment when expressivity loses its grip on reality.

L’imaginaire médiatique de la gouvernance algorithmique : Netflix et le mythe de la recommandation dans les transformations de la production audiovisuelle

Christophe Magis
A myriad of discussions about the power of algorithmic recommendations has accompanied the emergence of Netflix as a subscription video on demand (SVOD) service and, above all, its entry into content production from 2012 onwards. According to the conventional narrative, the extremely detailed knowledge that recommendation algorithms have of users’ audiovisual consumption habits is capable of guiding the company in its creative choices, ensuring the production or acquisition of programs that are certain to meet success. This article analyzes this narrative and traces its trajectory in relation to Netflix’s development strategies. By portraying the platform as a “tech” outsider in an audiovisual sector that it intends to “disrupt”—following Silicon Valley’s rhetoric—, this discourse is essential to its financial communication, even though the logic of Netflix is increasingly similar to the traditional production process of the cultural industries. Drawing on a political economy of communication perspective we analyze it in the context of the mythical syntagma that traditionally surround the deployment of media technologies.

La dissolution systémique du monde réel dans l’univers virtuel des nouvelles technologies de la communication informatique : une critique ontologique et anthropologique

Michel Freitag
This text addresses the issue of information and communication technologies from the perspective of their threefold philosophical, sociological, and anthropological significance, positing that these three levels are intimately linked within the historicity of our human nature. Human nature, in its uniqueness, is constituted by the symbolic, the field to which the concepts of information and communication are originally linked. The symbolic is therefore primary in regard of information and communication activities, which could only acquire meaning within it, before they became autonomous as simple systems, procedures, flows, and networks within the operational environment created by new technologies. But these technological modalities do not merely bring about a transformation of all the cultural modalities for regulating social practices. Indeed, their fundamental characteristic is, through information technology, to render the order of meaningful communication immediately operational. Thus, computerized communication becomes the universal, or rather global, model for the production or control of reality. By referring to the most radical characteristics of information and communication technologies, primarily synthetic imaging technologies and, more generally, the widespread digitization of information and communication, this text attempts to demonstrate that the development of computer machines and the indefinite dynamization of the relationships that constituted the overall balance of nature are becoming autonomous and escaping all direct control of our will, all pressure of our desire, and all commitment to our responsibility. Ultimately, the process of the systemic globalization of ICTs entails the dissolution of otherness and, consequently, of any synthetic constitution of individual and collective identity. There is no longer a world outside of us (the reality principle), but only a multitude of fluctuating environmental horizons that interpe- netrate without ever overlapping in a single image.

Anachronismes. Éléments pour une philosophie de l’intempestivité, de Baptiste Rappin / Baptiste Rappin, Anachronismes. Éléments pour une philosophie de l’intempestivité, Nice, Ovadia, 2023, 444 p.

Gilles Labelle

Hegel. De la logophonie comme chant du signe, de Jean-Luc Gouin / Jean-Luc Gouin, Hegel. De la logophonie comme chant du signe, Paris, Mimesis, 2023

Gilles Labelle

Cap sur l’indépendance : ébauche d’un plan de lutte contre l’extrême droite, le fascisme et la guerre

Pierre Dubuc
Criticizing right-wing, far right, or fascist ideologies is not enough. A political project and a coherent strategy must be developed, taking into account the new international landscape and the relationships between nations and between classes in our society. The author revisits the referendums of 1980 and 1995, and the last thirty years, to draw a critical assessment of the ideology and action of the left.