Abstract
One of the most original philosophers to have addressed the world of information and computing technology in his writings, the Frenchman Pierre Musso, took a degree in Philosophy at the École Nationale Supérieure des Postes et Télécommunications, before obtaining a doctorate in Political Science at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Musso is professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Rennes 2 and at Télécom Paris Tech. The technical network is the key topic and concept in his critical approach to information and communication technologies. Musso has carried out in-depth research on the dissemination and prevalence of networked power, not only in its instrumental aspects, but also and above all in its cultural and political aspects, adopting an approach involving a multidisciplinary dialogue. Musso’s research looks to history, the philosophy of technology and the social sciences in his search for the origins of the idea of the network. He argues that the concept did not arise with the Internet, but has its roots in the ideas – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say in the plans – of Henri Saint-Simon and his disciples who became high priests of industrial development, Saint-Amand Bazard, Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin, and Michel Chevalier, among others. In addition to this introduction, this book brings together various researchers' contributions on Musso's theories, and the final chapter contains his brief comments on those contributions.
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Notes
- 1.
In their modern interpretation, Chevalier’s ideas were adopted by other Saint-Simonians who made plans and projects based on technical networks. Combined with each other, these different typologies formed a social system which was to be regulated by means of mixed policy solutions linking the role of the State with private and public enterprise, uniting industrialism and liberalism.
- 2.
Saint-Amand Bazard argued that networks were the engines of a policy of social change; Prosper Enfantin advocated a religion of universal communication guided by the power of networks; Chevalier argued for a liberal and technocratic political economy for communication networks.
- 3.
The biotechnological, Galenic-Cartesian association between networks and the body, which “naturalizes” networks and technical solutions; the Leibnizian formulation of the network as logical or rational design, having no a priori meaning, but merely establishing connections and parallels; the technical network as the social and technical revolution which disrupts the existing social organization, adapted from Chevalier’s theories and revived by the ideologues of modern networked innovations; the Saint-Simonian-inspired network as a technical solution which would provide peace and prosperity; the network as an economic tool for dealing with crisis, defining techno-economic policies and promising a new society; and the network as a structure which embodies in itself a choice of society or policy.
- 4.
This theory was supported by mathematicians and psychologists Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts. We should recall here that it was on the basis of this assumption that the mathematician and scientist Norbert Wiener asserted that organisms and machines share similar regulatory mechanisms as producers of communication.
- 5.
See, in this connection, Garcia (2015).
- 6.
On this subject, see also Subtil (2014).
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This chapter was supported by the Portuguese national funding agency for science, research and technology (FCT), as part of the UID/SIC/50013/2013 Project.
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Garcia, J.L. (2016). Introduction: Towards a Critical Philosophy of Networks – Reflections on the Perspective of Pierre Musso. In: Garcia, J. (eds) Pierre Musso and the Network Society. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 27. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45538-9_1
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