Benoît VIROLE is a psychopathologist and is PhD in sciences of the language. This double education together with a speciality in bioacoustics gives him a unique experience in human, and particularly infantile clinical studies, domain where he practices as psychotherapist at the Robert Debré hospital (audiophonology, cochlear implants) and with the deaf children in the first sector of infant-young psychiatry of Paris. At the same time, he participates in various missions of consulting and expertise (video games, audiology, infantile literature, psychometrics, etc.) and conducts experimental studies in orthophony, in acoustics, in phonetics, on the semantic networks or on the psychological factors bound to in vitro fertilizations and MAP at the INSERM Institute (France). Among his last works: Praise of the autistic thought, publishing of the Contemporary archives, EAC (2015); Mission on the Yangtze, publishing of the Difference (2013); The Complexity of the self, Charielleditions (2011); with Radillo A., Cyberpsychology, Dunod (2010) and Deafness and human sciences, Harmattan (2009). In this article, the author raises an unpublished subject for PLASTIR: the noxious effects and paradoxically stimulating of the wars on the human literature. Fascinating way which analyses as much the form as the bottom, while raising the palimpsests of the history and the role of the imagination. He summarizes basically his approach as follows: » The literature, the fashion of apprehension of the reality, reveals the truth on the war. This truth is not the denunciation, just but ineffective of its abomination, but the revelation of a link between the experiment of the being and the morphology of the war. The war, guided by the gradient of the victory – Which is not the physical destruction of other one but updating of a political purpose – is not a formless chaos even if, by nature, it escapes the planning to take pleasure in the fog of the unpredictable frictions. Of the war emergent of the forms, frontlines, striking, holes, funnels, intestines, trenches, and dynamics, masses in movement, pressure, load, breakthrough, strengthening, encirclement, diffraction… These forms and dynamics seem indifferent to the History, and in a more debatable way, to the Geography. Every war, every fight, whatever their importance and their scale, are the duplicates of wars and previous fights. The palimpsest of the battles gives evidence of the independence of the forms of conflict towards the space and towards the time in whom they spread. The literature, detects, isolates, glorifies, metaphorise, these forms which structure the field of the war and are going to be of use as frame to the transformation of the antique hero, the military wing of the wrath of the gods, in a being alienated in the mass, then in a new individual being, reflexive and desperate existence in front of the inhumanity of the power. The literary treatment of the war, beyond its historic evolution, beyond the variety of the generative themes and author’s intentions, converges on the contemporary prospect of the solitude of the man. » Website of the author.
THE PLASTIC LIMITS OF THE HYBRID BODY
Judith NICOGOSSIAN is anthropobiologist, philosopher and columnist. Epistemologist of the human body, she is fascinated by the subject of the impact of techniques and of the technologies on the human body in health and in company and is interested in the human-machine interactions, as the virtual reality and the artificial intelligence. She worked 5 years in Sydney in Australia (Somatechnics, Macquarie University) and in the Center for Social Change Research of Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane). Author of numerous works as the illustrated one The standard of the body hybrid (coll. Movement of the knowledges, Harmattan, on 2016), she met within the framework of her ethnographical searches, artists as Stelarc (bio-art, Melbourne), and her inquiries gather numerous interviews of experts surgeons (Professors Moutet, Legre), of neurosurgeons (Alim Louis Benabid, author of the deep neurostimulation), Todd Kuiken from the Targeted Muscle Reinnervation), of inventors in medical computing (Philippe Cinquin, author of the bio-pile(bio-battery) in the glucose; Bertim Nahum, robot Rosa), ad of the cyberneticist Kevin Warwick, author of the implant RFID of University of Reading, U.K., which has for peculiarity to experiment its inventions on himself, as well as studies on patients – and of their experiences. Judith Nicogossian expressed in particular the concept of the auto-evolution (anthropobiology) and works on the possibility of an hybrid ontology as aesthetics of the existence (philosophy and ethics). In this article, she questions the Man-subject, the man as a sex object, the man-project, the human body as living, mouldable matter, real experimental field that the medical sciences explore, with the aim of extending and/or improving the conditions. It is the limits of the plastic art of the hybrid body that are questioned here at two levels: 1/the adaptability of the technologies (e.g. targeted reinnervation of the Muscle or the deep Neurostimulation) and techniques (e.g. the bionic prosthesis, the system of human-machine interface, biomaterials). The discoveries in neurosciences about the phenomena of neuroplasticity and the mechanisms of functional vicariance of the brain simulator contribute to approach the problems of adaptability and re-education; 2/ the ontological possibility as aesthetics of existence – the technologies of one can use the technologies of the market? – to encourage an ethical approach to the body crossed in machines and to new types of led interaction. In summary, she says: « I question here, – in a normative context, techniques and medical technologies of the human body, the emergent representations of » hybrid body « and fractures, the physical limits, the disjunction; Corporeities inserted into a paradoxical disorder, of cognitive dissonance, that at the same time to increase the power to act of an individual and to increase the power to act on an individual. To introduce a transfer inside the biological system, how far let’s can go to the physical transformation without pushing aside the notion of humanity?” Blog of the author.
SPEECH IN THE INTERFACE OF THE DIGITAL ART OF YVARAL AND MINIMALIST MUSIC
Frédéric Rossille, composer and concert performer collaborated with the IRCAM and the INA-GRM. Regular speaker of the seminary Music and plastic arts of the university Paris-IV Sorbonne, he gives recitals in France and abroad and his musics are created during international festivals. Alumnus of the composer Antoine Duhamel, he collaborated with Pr Marc Jeannerod on searches in neuropsychology of the vision. It is in the middle of the 1990s that he meets Jean-Pierre Yvaral with whom he will share his passion for the sciences, arts and culture. From where the relevance of his study which aims at highlighting the multiple echos between the digital art of Yvaral and the current of minimalist and post-minimalist musics. Pioneer of digital art, Yvaral (1934-2002) did not stop exploring the range of possibilities by exercising a geometrical and combinatorial art. Second son of Claire and Victor Vasarely, it is one of the co-founders of the Group of Searches for Visual Art (GRAV) which will bloom during the sixties. Later, his creations will take the aspect of series with themes, such his « cubic Structures » and his « structured Horizons ». From 1975, his searches will turn to the creation of faces and « digitized » landscapes for which he will help the IT tool from 1985. The minimalist music is born at the beginning of 1960s in the United States with the composers The Horsemanship Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Having presented Steve Reich’s minimalist play, our quest will go on towards the post-minimalist school who spreads out of 1975 in our days and with which are connected composers of diverse origins and varied esthetics. We shall so present plays of John Adam, Gavin Bryars, Laurie Anderson, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Takashi Yoshimatsu. In the course of the stakes in correspondences between digital art and minimalist music, our attention will concern to materials, processes, elaboration of the shape, but also on the underlying philosophies in the initiatives of the creators. In fine, Frédéric Rossille, shows us brilliantly here how the concept of musicality applies to the digital art of Yvaral. Website of the author.
THE CARTESIANISM OF THE SCIENTIFIC MODELS
Abdelkader BACHTA is a professor of philosophy at the University of Tunis. Regular author of PLASTIR, he published numerous articles on the theoretical contributions of the mathematician René Thom whom he recently gathered in the form of an entitled book » The scientific modelling – studies on the modelling thought René Thom » (MtL editions, Tunis, on 2016). More generally, the author handles scientific models and theories of the knowledge, just like his recent essay published in PLASTIR 43, 09/2016 which approaches the extreme paradigms of the physical and mathematical sciences of the 20th century as the Cartesianism and the idealism, situating them in a lucid epistemological context. This is evidenced by the first question asked in this paper by Abdelkader Bachta: » What relationship maintain the scientific models with the Cartesian identification: to unite, become widespread and reduce? » He will answer it partially versus the second regulae of the Speech of the Method by Descartes, in reference to the mathematical of Thom or Tarski and to the physics of Bohr and Galilee. The effect of the other rules is not neglected for all that. Quite the opposite, the author applies to show all the requirements of such a unity as his underlying significations, what a lot of anticartesian authors evades today, passing by the enormous modelling field opened by Descartes to the basis of the construction of any scientific models, as of the work of d’Alembert or Conte, to only hold the positivism of a philosophy which, if we dwell there, is far from being purely mechanistic. Quantitative mathematics, but also qualitative one would be concerned according to the author, as much as « the empty world and without resistance » of Galilee, precursor of the restraint relativity of Einstein … or the mathematical universal of Regulae from Descartes, whose principles linking material and area are a part « of simplifications, inevitably unifying and generalizing, made to evacuate the subtantialism of the classics … » From where this « back ontological bottom of any modelling » of which we are all indebted to Descartes.