Présentation sur le « devenir machinique du livre » au colloque « Des manuscrits antiques à l’ère digitale. Lectures et littératies » à l’Université de Lausanne. Cet exposé est une première tentative pour réintégrer l’évolution du livre dans le cadre plus général de l’évolution des représentations régulées.
Maps have become interactive geographical systems. Tables have become spreadsheets. Progressively most of our intellectual tools are successfully transformed into machines. But, for some reasons, printed books seem to resist. We believe that this resistance to a mechanization process that has demonstrated its generality for several other media is probably due to the competition with another kind of intellectual technology, the Encyclopedia. The Book primary function, to organize a discourse in a closed volume, does not translate well in a world wide technological system dominated by the desire to continuously document the world through standardized templates. Now, the Book seems to be at a crossroad. Either it merges with the current dominating intellectual technology with the risk of losing its original structuring function or it continues its journey in a new closed embodiment capable to survive in a world dominated by the restructuring technologies of the Encyclopedia. The kind of machine the Book will become will certainly have a decisive impact on the way we act, think and feel in the future. </p></p>
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