Empruntant (sans les rendre immédiatement) quelques chemins de traverse (par exemple ce que c’est qu’une institution et ce qu’on lui doit dans des types de sociétés différents, comment fonctionne le discours historiographique et ce qu’il engage dans le rapport au passé et au présent, à l’altérité et aux morts), cette réflexion met en scène certains scénarios de la médiation et certains affolements face à l’immédiateté.

En étudiant deux cas de figure très différents l’un de l’autre, on peut voir certaines conditions d’invisibilité des écrans grâce à des déplacements médiatiques et à des jeux de temporalité. Le premier cas est une brève scène marginale de Terminator de James Cameron (1984) qui montre deux fillettes dans l’année 2029 qui sont fascinées par un téléviseur obsolète à l’écran disparu et dans lequel un feu flamboie. Le second cas est une œuvre–promenade de Janet Cardiff, Conspiracy Theory / Théorie du complot (2002), dans laquelle le participant est engagé dans l’expérimentation d’une marche, caméra vidéo en main, donnant ainsi une impression d’écran à la fois présent et débordé par un phénomène de déjà-vu.

Introduction:"Impacting" Higher Education? Éric Méchoulan (bio) Translated by Roxanne Lapidus "Men living under the domination of catchwords live in a hell of their own making." - Ezra Pound (22) The modern university, inspired by the German model envisioned by Wilhelm von Humboldt, is often considered an "ivory tower," since it seems to position itself outside of political and economic influences. By refusing any external impact on its freedom to organize research and teaching, it has the tendency to cut itself off from the rest of society. But it is this very freedom that nurtures the civic model of social apprenticeship. Outside of immediate political or religious interests, outside of economic investments in the formation solely of elites, is the necessary Bildung: edification by the knowledge of individuals who can live, in a just manner, with others. The university does not just form brilliant researchers, but also devoted citizens. The ivory tower of the university has in fact as its paradoxical task the assured integration of individuals into the cultural model of the nation—a way not only to get beyond immediate politico-economical stakes, but also to get beyond time itself in order to better control it. The university as understood by Humboldt breaks with a certain control of time, loosely linked to the thinking current in German scientific circles at the time. Up until the beginning of the 18th century, Protestant countries preferred to keep the Julian calendar rather than concede to the Gregorian one, as Catholic countries had done since 1582. Hence religious factions were under different orderings of time. Nevertheless, the need for adjustments won out for political and economic reasons1—perhaps also as a way of secularizing the relation to time. In Prussia, Frederick I created the Academy of Sciences, and assigned it the responsibility of coming up with a new calendar. Leibniz himself was given the direction of this task. He labored to create a calendar that would be as complete as possible for both peasants and businessmen, and wanted to make it a "library of the common man"—social consciousness must henceforth be structured like an agenda. Previously, the priests in Rome had determined feast days and ordinary days; henceforth it would be scientists of [End Page 3] the Academy who would play the role of priests of their time.3 There was another trump card: the Academy, with a monopoly on its publications, was assured significant income. It was with this resource that the modern University of Humboldt broke away in order to better distance itself from any form of interest, be it that of the State or the economic productions of the scientists themselves. The university likewise ostensibly withdrew from the influence of religious dogmatism. One must go beyond the temporal calculations controlled by the Academy of Sciences in order to better constitute the place for producing citizens. In other words, this is how to truly constitute a "library of the common man," without partisan interest, in order to better build a common national culture. Thus higher education springs from the public domain, even if private universities exploit the model to produce social elites. Today, in subjecting universities more and more to calculations of their impact on society or on the "general public," it is not certain that we are truly pursuing the education of the public and the construction of a common ground. On the contrary, it seems that this allows the university to be appropriated by those with the means to do so. In a world obsessed with measurement, it seems indispensable to calculate "impact." But with what criteria? I would like to pursue this inquiry into the concept of "impact," which is at the heart of the "measurement" of the university. If we follow this logic of calculation that is imposed upon us, with its ramifications in the area of academic management, we can get a glimpse of the university of the future. First of all, the "measurers" rigorously separate research from teaching, with the claim that this will allow a better redistribution of tasks and greater productivity in both areas. Between these areas, to a greater and greater extent, administrators intervene, the majority of whom...

Impacting the University:An Archeology of the Future Éric Méchoulan (bio) Translated by Roxanne Lapidus In memoriam Bill Readings It is generally agreed that the modern university originated in early 19th-century Prussia, under the inspiration of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Thus it was stamped with the seal of idealism and of German Romanticism. Today the entrepreneurial model that seems to be imposing itself on universities around the globe confounds this former ideal, particularly by requiring academia to report on its economically quantifiable "impact." But an impact on what, exactly? On knowledge in general? On society at large? On industry? Is it a question of developing the critical acumen of each person in a democratic universe in which the citizen must be formed as well as informed? Or is it a question of favoring industrial innovation and producing workers for the job market? One often has the impression that the term "impact" belongs to some magical incantation: one has only to use it to align the university on the side of an economically viable 21st century. Thus it appears useful, in our highly utilitarian times, to examine the notion more closely and to grasp the very impact it can have on discourses and individuals. The Figure of Impact The notion of "impact" comes from the physics of solids: it designates the pressure exercised by one body on another at the moment of collision. Impact always implies the exercise of a certain violence. Its economic or social usage is clearly figural, in the often vague sense of "effect" or "influence." However, it is worth noting that its first figural use is exactly contemporary with Humboldt. We find it in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English idealist and romantic poet who, in fact, had studied in German universities and was influenced (impacted?) by Kant, Fichte and Schelling. In one of his most remarkable texts, Biographia Literaria, Coleridge introduces his poems by an long and convoluted autobiographical preface, as well as by a group of philosophical considerations that underly the poems, as though it were a question of communicating to the reader the complexity of relations among life, thought, and writing. Within this preface that both feeds and constrains the reader's understanding, Coleridge [End Page 7] pens a chapter on dualism, where he confronts the fundamental question of the link between perception and idea: Let any reflecting mind make the experiment of explaining to itself the evidence of our sensuous intuitions, from the hypothesis that in any given perception there is a something which has been communicated to it [the mind] by an impact, or an impression ab extra. [...] Thus, as materialism has been generally taught, it is utterly unintelligible [...]. But as soon as it becomes intelligible, it ceases to be materialism. (90-91) To better undermine the materialist posture, Coleridge stresses the mysterious metamorphosis, which must be thought through, between perception and idea, between the sensible and the intelligible. The sudden figurative use of the notion of impact intervenes at precisely this moment, to stress the unintelligibility of that "something" that has been communicated to the mind by the senses. In other words, the figurative use of the notion, which up to that point had been a matter of the senses, serves, not to calculate an effect, but to show the impossibility of a "real" impact. Paul de Man, who made subtle readings of the symbol in Coleridge, would have appreciated this figuration of the disfiguration of the subtle process that itself disfigures the way to consider the body-mind connection. For Coleridge, the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible does not retreat into a supposed impact of the one upon the other, but must be the very condition of their reciprocal manifestation: all opposition is a tendency to reunion [...] their opposition [is] the condition of all existence or being manifested: and every thing or phenomenon is the exponent of a synthesis as long as the opposite energies are retained in that synthesis" (The Friend, vol. 4, 94). Without needing to return to a rigorous dualism, we can nevertheless keep in mind the complex relationship that impact maintains with it own figuration or with its sensible matter, as well...

Archiving in the Age of Digital Conversion:Notes for a Politics of "Remains" Éric Méchoulan (bio) Translated by Roxanne Lapidus Over the last few decades, the public institutions responsible for archiving have been confronted with new challenges arising from electronic communication. Nevertheless, as a specialist in such national institutions has noted, "although some actions have been taken, digital preservation research and implementation are still in their infancy" (Steenbakkers). There have been numerous inquiries and research projects on archiving, and there is no doubt that studies on the digitalization of manuscripts, printed matter, photos, films, sound recordings and more have resulted in a number of short- or intermediate-term solutions. However, solutions often differ from country to country, and the rapidly evolving techniques for preserving and reproducing require frequent updating. Hence the problems posed still need to be pondered in their breadth and depth. The archive is located at the intersection, on the one hand, of the materiality of the means of preservation and communication of documents, and on the other hand, of the relationships of power and of the institutions of the past. The archive is a particular case of social transmission. One could even say that it transforms a text, an image, or a sound into a document, in the same way that a rubber stamp gives a letter an official status. The archive is an authorization to endure beyond the ephemerality that characterizes human productions. In the strict sense, an archive is "an assemblage of documents, no matter what their form or their material support, whose increase is ensured automatically through the activities of a private or public person" (André, 29). However, it is judicious also to think of the archive as every trace of the past that has been documented, thus giving it an authority (at least potential) by this act of conservation or of extraction. Now, in the age of digital communication, the ways of recording our present have mutated. Thus it is essential to address the question of the contemporary archive with epistemological and historical breadth, in order to better grasp its difficulties and possibilities. These stakes concern not only archival technology, though this is important. Recall the Stasi archives recovered ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall: they were on the hard drive of an obsolete computer, whose [End Page 92] software was unreadable. Likewise, in March 2007, in reformatting a hard drive, a technician erased 800,000 images from Alaska's permanent collection, valued at $38 million (he also erased the backup drive, while the third backup—floppy disks—were illegible). These examples demonstrate both the economic, political, and social value of the archive, and its electronic vulnerability. Ease of storage, diffusion and accessibility do not necessarily mean that all problems are resolved. Stories of electronic catastrophes have made news headlines. Others are more mundane and forgotten, making us realize that the problem is not accidental but structural: the rapid obsolescence of computers and software necessitate constant "migrations" and upgrading, but such upgrading is often done only for the documents that are consulted the most. Meanwhile, hyperlinks are broken, the average longevity of a web page is 44 days, and you could look in vain for the very first announcement of a university that appeared in 1995. In London in November 2010 a movement was launched to demonstrate digital archaeology—"an attempt to kick-start a wider attempt to archive the web in Britain's first 'digital archive,' since, 'In five years' time or so, I doubt websites will exist and I expect the vast majority of sites from the first twenty years of the Web to be gone forever.' says Jim Boulton, curator of Digital Archaeology." 1 If technological obsolescence forces transfers that lose some of the integrity of the original documents, while numerous other resources (texts, images, web pages, etc.) are lost through lack of upgrading, the flip side is information overload and the overwhelming mass of resources that become, paradoxically, a problem for managing the pertinent documents. As Bertrand Gervais has aptly put it, "we no longer need to wave our magic wand to find the text; rather, we need to build a dam to contain the...

À la différence de maints penseurs contemporains, Bergson situe sa pensée dans le cadre explicite de la métaphysique; mais une métaphysique qui n’est plus celle de la substance et de la présence, il s’agit d’une métaphysique de la durée qui implique autant absence que présence. Par là, il est à la fois anachroniquement métaphysicien (obsolète), mais aussi penseur de l’être en tant qu’anachronique. Ce sont ces investissements qui intéressent aujourd’hui l’intermédialité.

Après l’intertextualité qui visait à sortir le texte de son autonomie supposée; après l’interdiscursivité qui saisissait que l’unité est constituée des multiples discours que ramasse et traverse le texte; voici l’intermédialité qui étudie comment textes et discours ne sont pas seulement des ordres de langage, mais aussi des supports, des modes de transmission, des apprentissages de codes, des leçons de choses. Ces médiations ont des histoires : les intermédialités en forment les plans de consistance. Le concept d’intermédialité opère alors à trois niveaux différents d’analyse. Il peut désigner, d’abord, les relations entre divers médias (voire entre diverses pratiques artistiques associées à des médias délimités). Ensuite, ce creuset de média d’où émerge et s’institutionnalise peu à peu un médium bien circonscrit. Enfin, le milieu en général dans lequel les médias prennent forme et sens : l’intermédialité est immédiatement présente à toute pratique d’un médium. Encore faut-il en percevoir aussi l’actualité en fonction des nouvelles figures sociales du travail immatériel.

Au xviie siècle, l’amitié forme, avant toute chose, un lien social et politique qui se voit réinvesti, au sortir des Guerres de religion, dans une recomposition de la morale quotidienne. Mais cette image harmonieuse de l’amitié est aussi une production fantasmatique du social qui a aussi ses implications tyranniques et ses dangers politiques. L’article examine les différentes manifestations de l’amitié dans L’Astrée d’Honoré d’Urfé et dans le Francion de Charles Sorel.