Contenu du sommaire : L'Autre n'est pas une donnée

The body, between meaning and information
The human condition is physical. The individual exists only where he is held through his senses, his affectivity, his gestures or his movements. His presence to the world is always the one of an embodiment in action. The body is a supplier of meanings at multiple levels. The information is a mathematical, universal datum, not a semantic datum. The meaning includes the ambivalence, the ambiguity, the requirement of a context. The thought which handles meanings is not a place of data processing.

Bioeconomics and the cybernetic body
The body's molecularisation through the deconstruction of its biological components is the epistemological foundation of bioeconomics, which rests on a cybernetic model of life and economics. Tangibly of course, the body does not disappear, but the molecular vision contributes to its dematerialisation and technoscientific decomposition, thus masking the new dynamics of its economic appropriation.

The body in cognitive semantics
As an alternative to cognitivism-computationalism, the experientialist paradigm reintroduces the body into the theories of cognition. In this context, based the concept of image-schema, cognitive semantics proposes a common embodied ground to the understanding of experience and to the understanding of language. In doing so, it views communication as based not on the ability of individuals to process symbols with objective meanings, but on an intersubjectivity between individuals sharing a common embodied, socially- and culturally situated experience.

Direct communication by the living body. Emersiology in the first person
Emersiology is a reflexive science dealing with the emersion of sentient life in the consciously experienced body. Emersion is the involuntary movement, within our bodies, of connections, humours and images of which only the tip reaches our awareness. A new step in first-person awareness of being alive – now being achieved thanks to in vivo neuroscience – is immersion in a living body to demonstrate the conditions of its emersion, in other words how it emerges from its cognitive immersion in the consciously experienced body.

The body, an object of discourse and a means of forging relationships
The body is not only a theme in the major Eastern religions and in religious mysticism, but also in contemporary philosophy. In itself, the theme of the body is a meeting place between specialised discourses in which the individual is an object of knowledge. But underlying the different approaches are different varieties of ethics and metaphysics : any thinking on the body proclaims certain values and guides practices to be adhered to. This article seeks to compare these scholarly forms of discourse with cultural patterns in the relational aspects of bodily expression.

Hysteria, where sex and language intersect
Contrary to received opinion, conversion disorders in these early years of the 21st century are by no means a thing of the past. In fact the opposite is true : advances in medical investigation techniques are showing that the condition is occurring more frequently than previously thought. The aim in this article is to highlight the importance of the conversion model in the information and communication sciences. « Hysterical » patients, through their bodies and their symptoms, activate desires in others by placing them in the paradoxical position of having to produce knowledge (Lacan) while causing a paralysis of thought (Bollas) that literally leaves them in a trance. Poor knowledge on hysteria, which is a major epistemological problem of our time, is liable to lead to errors in appreciation in both the cognitive sciences and the neurosciences.

Alexithymia and operative thinking
In this article, we examine the concept of alexithymia, first described in 1967, in the light of the metapsychology of operative thinking and negative hallucination. The concept of alexithymia is known and recognised today in the fields of psychopathology, psychology, medicine and psychosomatics. From the point of view of psychoanalytical psychosomatics, the concept is close to that of « operative thinking » as described by P. Marty in 1963, even though the author is aware that they do not belong to the same epistemological field : neuroscience and psychiatry in the case of alexithymia and psychoanalysis for operative thinking. However, clinical practice has imposed the use of both concepts, thus requiring a reassessment of alexithymia in metapsychology, as has already been the case with operative thinking. In order to establish links between negative hallucination, operative state and alexithymia, the added complexity of A. Green needs to be brought into Freudian metapsychology.

Disabled communication. Do highly gifted and autistic children still have a body?
Today, language and its multiple meanings have been turned into « communication », where social and emotional skills have become substitutes for libidinal and emotional investment, while contemporary interest in intelligence and its various forms has replaced questions on the instinctual foundations of thought. New symptomatic expressions are fitting in with this trend, with neurodevelopmental disorders tending to cover the entire spectrum of infant psychopathology. We show how past and current clinical practice can shed light on these contemporary expressions of suffering : « gifted » or « Asperger » children are a very good illustration of the way in which the inability to invest in the body and its auto-erotic pleasures in the early years of life can block relational skills that develop through representations of self and others. We conclude with an argument in favour of transference as a possible method of mental reanimation of these « robot » children.

From cybernetics to NBIC : moving beyond the human through information and machines
The birth of cybernetics gave its structure to the technological momentum of the post-war years to the late 20th century. Cybernetics developed in several scientific fields : while often associated with the development of information science, it is also present in fields ranging from the development of models to understand and explain human thought to computer programming, studies on living genomes or projects on nanometric manipulation, by single atoms, of materials that we are now attempting to manipulate or to manufacture anew. These four fields - nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive sciences – are those where convergence is being sought in some quarters through the recent NBIC movement. This points to a future that could favour a privileged few, or even hybrid or transhuman individuals of whom we know nothing as regards their desire, or not, to exist together. Such a future would be far removed from the humanist ideas of the Enlightenment.

The (non) appearance of otherness in the cognitive sciences
The cognitive sciences developed in conjunction with discoveries in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology and neuroscience. From these scientific points of view, individual cognition has always been considered as exemplary, sublimated and, ultimately, non-material. However, studies of human communication are pointing to the need to consider the cognition of otherness and its specificity.

Half a century at the heart of the digital world : travels of a data geek
Our everyday activities are gradually being blanketed by a digital overlayer through which all our relationships with facts and things are being mediated. This worrying development, already suggested by a number of researchers, is described here through the personal, and partial, experience of one of the builders of today's digital world. The analyses of events and encounters that shaped today's data mining field are also those that shaped Alain Lelu's career. His autobiographical account clearly shows how recommendation algorithms are taking us a step too far, towards a wholly digital world where calculations are gradually replacing inaccessible data about human desires, attraction and choices.

Is the ubiquity of information undermining otherness ?
Information processing technologies are pervading every crevice of our relations with the world and with « others » ; questions were raised from the outset on the very nature of such instrumented relationships. As their pervasiveness is taken to extremes in our everyday interactions, the trend towards invisible mass integration of information technologies into our environment is now raising wider questions on how we experience the world, while also spotlighting one of the most decisive ideological trajectories in contemporary technological development.

« Hyperconnected » glasses and otherness
The arrival on the market of « hyperconnected » glasses is raising many questions on the increasing mediation of social relationships through digital tools. « Google Glasses » are designed to be permanently connected to the Internet, and can be worn all day long to add digital information to our « natural » field of vision and to record our various actions. Having such systems available to the public at large raises challenging questions on the impact of all-pervading informatics and « wearable computing » on our private lives, on the way we build up social relationships and on the very definition of otherness.

Thirty years of « partly participatory » observation of the neurosciences
The last thirty years have seen a transition from proliferating models of human thought processes to the hegemony of the biological perspective. For all their social prestige and spectacular discoveries, a sense of irritation towards the neurosciences has persisted to this day. This may be accounted for by the disappointing paucity of concrete results, especially in psychiatry, and an often clumsy and inappropriate manner of speaking out the truth.

Humans and machines, the miror stage
Talking about interaction or man / machine dialogue leads to a subversion of the relationship between the object and the subject, therefore becoming the orphan of any ontological exception. In addition to its treatment by philosophy and cognitive science, this question dominates the famous stories of popular culture for more than a century : through the conflict human / robot, which renews the reading of the old myth of the Golem, books and movies today question the specific nature of the man and his ability to communicate.

How the digital experience changes our relationships with others : an introduction to the phenomenotechnics of otherness. How does the digital experience change our relationships with others ? How is our difference from others manifested, in our age of digital artefacts ? In this article, we look into artefacts in general as phenomena offered up to our conscious perception, starting from the principle that the manifestation of being (ontophany), and therefore of perception, is a process that is always conditioned a priori by technical factors. This means considering that otherness itself, in actual experience, is already, and always, a technical phenomenon, or at least that it is technically conditioned and structured. While the Other is not a datum created by technology, it is nevertheless brought to us by the techno-perceptual environment in which we live. In our new digital environment, the manifestation of otherness, or allophany, has taken on a new and singular shape that, in terms of phenomenology, is transforming our experience of the presence of Others, of which one of the most significant manifestations is their online presence as friends.

Generation Y and Leibnitz's monad
In their use of social networks, the young people known as « generation Y », born and raised in the world of new technologies, have been forging a new kind of identity. As they tirelessly surf the Net, bearing their message of freedom, they also convey an inescapable contradiction : despite being virtually connected every minute of the day, they are at the same time alone and withdrawn into themselves. The figure that best represents this state of being could be the monad defined by the philosopher G. W. Leibniz, an individual who, with no window on the outside world, reflects the entire world in endless mirror images.

Difference or death. Resisting the undifferentiated
Unnerved by totalitarian ideologies, we have tended to overamplify the question of difference and to cling to the idea of preserving particularities in the context of democratic societies. But have we taken this too far ? It is time to tackle the idea of cultural convergence, to make sure of the reasons we have to live together, with all our differences. To counter the relativism that was threatening us with atomisation, we wish to turn, not to abstract universalism but to a position capable of linking up different cultural identities within a single space.

Alientity and communication« Alientity » is a term coined in opposition to « identity ». Whereas identities are the object of representations that are expressed in the course of symbolic exchanges, discourses and communication, « alientity » refers to what cannot be the object of representations, what is outside the public sphere and outside the ordinary spheres of language and symbolic practice. Therefore, « alientity » could be defined as what is not communicable, what cannot be represented, what is outside the public sphere. Communication is based on recognition of meaning that is itself based on a specular recognition of identities, while the world of alientity is peopled by the absence of recognition and the lack of any common language. By fragmenting the social sphere into ghettos and separate identities, social discrimination breaks up the necessity of equality in democracy and prevents communication, which is the precondition for establishing a shared identity and citizenship.

Interfaced humanity, between continuity and discontinuity
This article discusses research themes that introduce new perspectives on communication at a time of flux in the contours that define humanity. Interfaced humanity is humanity that questions its singularity, as the frontiers of what is human become blurred with those of technology, nature and the animal. Three themes are discussed here : points of abutment of communication that become its fulcrum ; written sign language where the living and the symbolic intersect ; humans as new watchmakers of their own bodies faced with the impossible homeostasis of body and mind. There is an urgent need in the information and communication sciences to address the question of human communication at a time of convergence, through the notion of data, between the living and the artificial, in order to open up theoretical debates on these themes. Many authors of reflections on humanity in recent years have opened up new ways of thinking on human communication. The question now is to discuss how far the emergence of interfaced humanity and its relationships with what is artificial are changing human communication and thinking.

1964 : a media, civilian and military coup in Brazil
From a point of intersection between communication and history, this article argues that the Brazilian coup on 31 March 1964 should be characterised empirically as driven by civilians and the military at once. In 2014, 50 years after the coup that brought down President João Goulart, Brazil is still trying to come to terms with its past as it prepares to hold presidential elections and to organise football's next World Cup, a sport that served the military regime well in 1970.

Europe, communication and the media
The European model of communication is dysfunctional for four main reasons : it lacks a strategic dimension, it is too central-ised, too dominated by a single language, English, and over-re l iant on paper. For this to change, all communication budgets need to be centralised under the European Commission presidency, the powers and means of national delegates need to be strengthened, all communication should be fully multilingual and a major shift is required from paper to digital media, via Euronews. There is also a need to reform the content of EU communication, which focuses too heavily on macro-economics, in order to shift the emphasis to European citizenship.

Conspiracy theories and political communication in South Korea
This article analyses arguments based on conspiracy theories that are put forward by politicians from the ruling party in South Korea, in order to understand why communication between politicians and citizens has become fraught with difficulty. We chose to investigate this issue for two reasons. Firstly, arguments drawing on conspiracy theories tend to block communication between political groups and to promote mutual hostility rather than open discussion. Secondly, political communication based on conspiracy theories is more focused on political calculation than on solving problems.