Lundi 5 mars 2019, j’ai eu l’occasion de présenter le projet U2P050 — dont vous trouverez le détail dans le texte ci-dessous — à l’université Érasme de Rotterdam. Devant un parterre d’étudiants en gestion et en management, réuni dans le cadre des Sustainability Days 2019 de l’Erasmus University of Rotterdam, j’ai voulu montrer par l’exemple de notre propre expérience entrepreneuriale pourquoi il faut dépasser, outrepasser même, le stade de la durabilité (« sustainability« ), pour rejoindre le stade de l’écologie profonde. Je vous retranscris ici le texte dans son exhaustivité :

 

In 1966, Michel Foucault, a French philosopher very well known in France, and beyond in the whole world — I am sure that in Rotterdam too —, announced at the end of his book The Order of Things a metaphysical change to come in Western cultures. What he called, and what we call after him, « the death of man”. It’s quite strange, you’ll agree. So what exactly is this all about? Obviously, it is not a question of saying that humanity will disappear, through the effect of a disaster such as the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. To fully understand this idea of « the death of man », we must in fact abandon the Hollywood disaster scenarios that saturate our popular imagination: neither zombies preparing to infect humanity, nor machines secretly fomenting an overthrow of their human creators. It is rather a matter of predicting the death of man as he became, two and a half centuries ago, the main object of scientific knowledges. The sciences — since Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason, but that is not the essential for us tonight — have taken man, the human being, existence as lived by the human subject, as the principle of knowledge. As essential proof, Foucault took the emergence of the human sciences, and in particular anthropology, at the beginning of the 19th century.

Well, the announcement of the imminent death of man raised many questions in Foucault’s contemporaries, even very sharp criticism; and I am sure that such an announcement, even 60 years after it was first made, raises in you the same questions, the same doubts, and that you are formulating very harsh criticisms at this very moment against a supposed “death of man”. Yet, if you are here tonight, and if you are participating in these four days of reflection on sustainability, you are in fact the actors of this metaphysical change that relativizes the overly important place that has been given to man in the order of knowledge. Ecology in general is a current of thought that relativizes the place of man in the natural environment, on the scale of particular eco-systems or on the much more global scale of the planet. So, of course there are different types of ecology, and for one thing ecology does not leave a purely human integration: basically, we spare our environment so that man — always him! — lives better, in future, in his environment. But the more ecology is invested by individuals, the more the place of man is relativized, you will agree with that. We can take the example of animal ethics, which is a more and more important form of ecology. The animals are taken for themselves, in themselves, as the perfect equal of humans. I find this quite disconcerting, but above all extremely interesting. We must note a « deepening » of ecology ; an ecology that is becoming deeper and deeper. What is called « deep ecology » is a new trend in ecology, which is becoming increasingly prevalent among environmental studies. This deep ecology considers each of the elements that inhabit an environment in a way that is completely independent of the use that a human can make of it. Beyond environmental studies, contemporary philosophy elaborates, mainly in France and in the United States, what are called O.O.O. (Objects-Oriented Ontologies), basically new ways of understanding the world, independently of any human understanding. Obviously it’s extremely difficult, it poses many problems, especially because it’s still human beings who are thinking about it. But it gives exciting and really very strange things, such as studying the relationship between a cotton ball and a flame when the fire burns the cotton or the cotton feeds the fire. This is where ecology leads us, namely in philosophy.

Moreover, another major rupture has recently occurred within Western culture, a rupture that is directly linked to the deepening of ecology. I am talking about a total reconsideration of technologies. I don’t wanna be too long, so I’m going to ask you to take my word for it, perhaps using your intuition. (Philosophy students love to do that !) Our culture, which was born as you know in Greece a few hundred years ago, was built in opposition to various technologies and technical operations. First it was the writing, punished by Socrates (I wonder what would have remained of this old bearded man without the technique of writing; but anyway!). Then also the total repulsion of Christianity for the technical universe: the technical objects do not even appear in the « Great chain of being » in the Bible, whereas there are plants and stones. And we can also mention the perfect disdain of romantic artists, painters and writers, in the 19th century for the whole industrial field, when it was precisely changing the world before their eyes. Happily I think, contemporary philosophers, such as Gilbert Simondon or Gilles Deleuze, condemned this disdain of Western cultures for the tools and the machines. They took a closer look at it. And indeed, we realize in our time how essential technology is to us: the glasses I wear and that some of you also wear, our clothes, and even the tools and machines of medicine that allowed us all to be born at the maternity ward X years ago. Our daily lives are saturated with machines, and we ourselves integrate a number of mechanics that I would be tempted to call “devices” or “machinic devices”. Take for example the algorithms that allow us to suggest purchases on the Internet: they are based on information that characterizes us; they capture us in the privacy of our being, in order to carry out the operations that belong to them. I could have taken a completely different example: the bicycle, since we are in Holland. When you ride your bike to university from home, you contribute with the effort of your legs to the functioning of the « bicycle » tool; and thereby there is something like a machine or a machinic device that understands the bicycle, as a tool, and you, as a driving force, and finally as a tool too. Well, I realize when I say this, it may be a little strange too. For my part, I find it a convincing way to understand things and especially to understand how all these things work together. Look, I watched last night, before joining you in Rotterdam, a very interesting documentary on the ISS, the International Space Station. I was struck by how the few humans who live up there appear only as details in this whole universe of machines. I have provided you with a very evocative photograph.

The photograph captures a corridor of the ISS, where the spaceman, at the very bottom, appears as one machine among all the others. The ontological confusion is played out in the confusion of colours; and the movements of the body, at the very bottom, recall the twisted threads and the strange gymnastics of robots. Whatever it be, this reconsideration of technologies, even if it does not take on such proportions in your life or your mind, you are also its actors, like me. We are all actors in this reconsideration of technologies, through the repeated use we make of a certain number of them on a daily basis, and through the unanimous recognition of their indispensability to our lives. Technologies have become an essential component of our time: we talk about them, we make films, books or newspaper articles about them, we wonder about the place they hold in our lives, fascinating ourselves for the crazy evolutions that these technologies follow. For my part, I link this, first of all, to a certain stage reached by the capitalist system a few decades ago, a stage of overconsumption and increased innovation — but I know you are more expert than I am on these issues; and I link this secondly to the ecological crisis I mentioned earlier: to consider reality no longer on the basis of human experience, but from the environment where the human is only an element of the whole, it forces us to consider technical objects, which are very abundant in human environments.

Now that these two metaphysical trends of our very recent time have been identified, I would like us to come to the small company we have set up, with Félix around here, and with other friends who have stayed in Paris. The name of this company is U2P050. A machine name! Through this structure, we want to create, edit, produce, and sell documentary films. The specific model we have chosen for our business and the aesthetics of our films are very largely inspired by the two current trends that I have tried to convey to you previously. Deep ecology and reconsideration of the technical field. We want nothing from the distinctions between technical and production teams, as if there were on the one hand the real artists who create (production team) and on the other hand the little people who are slaves to this creation (technical team). To avoid these distinctions being made, even unconsciously, we try to ensure that everyone gets into everything. For example, as someone who is almost never a camera owner, I will sometimes have to stick to it, trying to integrate all the technical difficulties that the camera involves. This is very difficult to maintain, of course, but it is a modus operandi that we try to respect as much as possible. It’s funny to see how much cinema challenges, if we look more closely at it, the idea of a genius artist who is at the core, with his great spirit of genius, of a sublime work of art. Behind the work of art that a film constitutes, there is a whole swarm of diverse individuals (cooks, language teachers, sports coaches, actors of course, lighting designers, and so on), to such an extent that the very idea of a work of art, in its strict definition, no longer seems to correspond to the film-object. This is precisely what we want to report in our productions, even going so far as to question the king’s place, namely that of the director. Along the same lines, we want our films to question, by aesthetics consideration, the permanent concealment of the conditions in which they are made. We must be able to see, even in a half-tone, even in the fleetingness of an instant, the boom operator who stretches the long microphone over a scene. Like a mirror hold by the film itself. Like a cinema on cinema. It is reminiscent of a 1929 film by Russian director Dziga Vertov, an eminently well-known film, The Man with a Movie Camera, in which we are immersed, all the time of the film, in the technical processes specific to the cinema. This is a demonstration, in both technique and image, of what cinema can do, when it was only 30 years old.

Another essential component of our aesthetics, which touches more on the nature of documentary than on the nature of cinema itself: it is a desire to question the place of the human and the human word, in line with ecological considerations, or rather « deep-ecologist », of which we were talking earlier. A documentary, when you watch it, seems to be only the operation by which images are linked to the words of learned speakers or to a voice-over, who are the holders of a truth that we want to know. In such a conception of documentary, images are only a pretext, and the truth is conveyed by human word. Of course, we reject such principles. Our aesthetics claim to be total, or at least more global than that: the voices that are extracted from the interviews are only counterpoints in the main score of the film, mixed with images, music and sounds, as well as subtitles for example, or a whole set of other things. And the voice-over, so characteristic of documentary art, is totally absent from our productions. We do not want humans to dominate in the films we make, we actually want to give them back the relative place that deep ecology attributes to them, for a sustainable planet.

Finally, I would like to reintroduce the general scheme of my remarks into the theme of this evening, « Art and sustainability » or « Art of sustainability », in case it has not been clear for everyone. On behalf of the company we have created, U2P050, we are making a call to go beyond the stage of sustainability, to something like a true ecology, a deep ecology as we have named it, which is not content with a few concessions, nor indeed a few connections between the economic, the environmental and the social. We must break down metaphysical barriers. Imagine a world where art, technical objects and economics are inextricably linked. Imagine a world where human privilege has been largely swept away for the benefit of an entire ecosystem of plants, stones, but also machines, robots, cameras and technology. Imagine, in short, a world that is already ours. This reversal is taking place in the order of things, as we can see from the evolution of science and philosophy over the past century. According to our analysis, it is a matter of taking full measure of it.