The Contributory Revolution

5The Salutary Crisis of Joy

5.1. The demolition of places

What could be more fundamental to humanity than the very concept of place? The Littré dictionary defines no less than 24 types of usage for the French term for place – lieu, orally denoted by a single phoneme. From taking-place to common-place to non-lieu (French for “no case”, in law), its uses are as multiple as the places from which it is spoken. I will look at just under half of the 24 definitions for lieu given by the Littré, and add three more: one from psychoanalysis, the place of the Other or the place from which we speak; another from its Latin etymological origin “locus”, used in genetics; and a third that I will call the technological place, i.e. the place of interaction between technical progress and logos, between technical progress and science.

How can we fail to note that these objects or phenomena designated by the word place are all overturned by the epistemological revolution that we are going through, driven in particular by the digital transition?

In Old French, the word lieu designated a special place, a sacred, religious or spiritual place, where the forces of Heaven merged with the forces of Earth. Then by extension, it meant a good place, good society, the court, government or a trustworthy authority. In less common usage, the French term also designates the place in a hierarchy, rank in a sense (as “know your place” infers today in English). What about those sacred places today, those places ...