Trace Factory 9781786304209, 1786304201

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The Trace Factory

Traces Set coordinated by Sylvie Leleu-Merviel

Volume 3

The Trace Factory

Yves Jeanneret

First published 2020 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address: ISTE Ltd 27-37 St George’s Road London SW19 4EU UK

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© ISTE Ltd 2020 The rights of Yves Jeanneret to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019954215 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78630-420-9

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

ix

Chapter 1. The Mediatized Trace of the Social World, the Object of Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1.1. There are traces and traces . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1.1. The avatars of a trace of use . . . . . . . . . 1.1.2. Metamorphoses of the trace . . . . . . . . . 1.1.3. Mediation, mediatization, device . . . . . . 1.2. The social trace as a problem: the legacy of the history of the book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.1. From book to reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.2. A constellation of categories . . . . . . . . . 1.2.3. Structural difficulties . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3. Relevance and efficiency . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3.1. The evasive relevance of the trace . . . . . . 1.3.2. An efficient figure of relevance . . . . . . . 1.3.3. Trace as an interpretative schema . . . . . .

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Chapter 2. The Schema of the Trace, a Paradoxical Semiotics . . . . . . . .

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2.1. The false evidence of the Peircian index . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.1. The concept of index and semiotic theory . . . . . . . . . 2.1.2. The index as a commonplace category . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.3. The production of indexicality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.4. Assessment: a problematic legacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2. The trace, appearance and presence of the past in the present . 2.2.1. The photographic scene, here, now and in the past . . . . 2.2.2. The theoretical issue of Barthes’ analysis . . . . . . . . . .

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2.3. From the archetype of the trace to its theoretical status . . . . 2.3.1. Photography as a commonplace archetype . . . . . . . . . 2.3.2. From the trace schema to the deployment of devices . . . 2.3.3. Photography as a pretext . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4. The mediatized trace, a complex info-communication device . 2.4.1. Device . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.2. Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.3. Representation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.4. Competence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.5. Format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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56 56 60 62 69 71 73 77 81 84

Chapter 3. The Complex Genesis of the Written Trace . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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3.1. The available inscription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1. Inscription as a framework for thought . . . . . . . . . 3.1.2. Grammatology or philosophy in the camera obscura . 3.1.3. Ichnology as radical logistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2. The thickness of the traced-out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.1. Actualized presentification in absentia . . . . . . . . . 3.2.2. Between inscription device and graphic gesture . . . . 3.2.3. The traced-out feature, a figure of mediation . . . . . . 3.3. It has been… written . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.1. Signature, a social act between identification and authentication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.2. Genetic criticism in the context of the trace/traced-out couple. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4. The written trace as an institutional fact . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.1. The written trace, a scientific assumption. . . . . . . . 3.4.2. The written trace, a device of social knowledge power 3.4.3. The written trace, an educational mediation . . . . . .

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Chapter 4. The Emerging Trace of the Media Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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4.1. The poetics of Mnemosyne: media forms and social memory 4.1.1. A mediatized space of thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.2. The trace schema questionned by the atlas of forms . . . 4.1.3. The poetics of Mnemosyne at work in media analysis . . 4.2. Indexical reading of media texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1. The textual witness as a ferment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2. The “index paradigm”, from its commonplace life to its heuristic scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.3. Quotations, from second hand to guestimates . . . . . .

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Contents

4.3. Writing in the future perfect . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.1. Mnemosyne struggling with Lethe . . . . . . . . 4.3.2. Changes in authority, economy of writings and media genesis of traces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.3. Memorial writing in devices . . . . . . . . . . .

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Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

259

Introduction Questioning the Evidence

Over the last two decades, the interest of many observers of society – journalists, essayists, activists, researchers, innovators, lawyers, writers, etc. – has been focused on the role played in the ecosystem of our lives by the fact that the traces (i.e. the trail of marks) an action leaves behind it of our exchanges, actions, interests and attitudes are recorded and processed by powerful actors. The feeling is that this traceability of our lives increasingly influences the definition of our identity, practices and culture. This observation, which causes some to be frightened and others to dream of control, has given rise in recent years to a number of works, manifestos and procedures. The phenomenon is not really new, but it has undoubtedly taken on a new dimension. Many tools for producing traces of acts, events, transactions and social relationships are very old. Some of them are centuries old. The major technical devices for identifying individuals and groups (Ollivier 2007), such as social statistics, photography, sound recording, mechanography and anthropometry, are more than a century old. My generation has been confronted, without necessarily being aware of it, with an impressive deployment of conceptions of society based on the idea of the “trace” at the theoretical, political and technical levels. The conception of thought as a trace in philosophy, the definition of power based on surveillance, sociology produced from the analysis of statistical correspondence, the generalization of surveys on lifestyles and public opinion, the defense of a paradigm of indexation based on the study of traces in the humanities, all date from the 1960s and 1970s. Over the past half-century, the challenge of collecting and producing traces, initially somewhat unnoticed, has become increasingly pressing. What has brought the presence of traces within social life to the forefront of concerns in recent years is the patent nature of the knowledge and power effects associated with their processing, so much so that the idea is spreading that we are now living in a society of traces.

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But in what sense? For those who have examined the considerable corpus of these topical texts, two observations are striking. On the one hand, the genesis of the idea of traces left behind over a lengthy period of time is almost totally absent; on the other hand, the omnipresence of the idea of the trace is accompanied by an obstinate sub-conceptualization – a feature it shares with other notions, such as information or data. It would seem that the use of the terms “trace” and “traceability” leads to a conceptual black hole. The trace seems to be at the foundation of everything and does not in itself need to be founded. In the past, I often played Don Quixote (too much?) by breaking my lances against postures that seemed ideological to me and insufficiently protected from vested interests. Such a distance is certainly necessary with regard to the society of traces. However, in this book, I do not principally wish to pursue a critical aim. I take seriously the initial observation that the trace is more often invoked than defined by proposing to give it meaning. I would like to contribute, among other things, to a problematic clarification of the questions raised by the use of the idea of the trace as well as the multiplication of info-communicative devices that claim to be based on this idea. This requires considering the trace more as a scientific concept, as a circulating notion having social and cultural effects, promoting a certain way of looking at the world, giving rise to social practices, taking the form of info-communication devices, some of which are very elaborate. In other words, I take seriously the fact that the trace is difficult for anyone to think about – for myself and others – and that it is thus all the more necessary to work together to do so. It is indeed a question of working together. This book is a personal contribution to a shared effort over time. It is part of a collective research movement to which it aims to make a specific and limited contribution. This is reflected in its publication within a collection of various research projects focused on the notion of the trace and intended to create dialogue between them. Returning quickly to this both individual and collective journey will allow me to explain what led me to identify one specific question, because it is not a matter of dealing here with all the forms of traces or all the issues related to them. The reflection I am offering today has been largely inspired by the place of dialogue in the activity of teachers and researchers in Information and Communication Sciences (ICS), my academic discipline. The definition of the object of study gradually emerged during these exchanges. The idea of making the trace an object of research was born when I joined the Teaching and Research Unit (UFR) of Information, Documentation, Scientific and Technological Information (Idist) at the University of Lille 3 to train students in information and documentary science. It is the dialogue with my colleagues, specialists in documentary activity and information theories and with students involved in library studies, information technology

Introduction

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systems and knowledge mediation that has made me aware of the importance of this issue. The problem has taken shape, in particular, through my lectures and the textbook resulting from them (Jeanneret 2000), and the conference Indice, Index, Indexation organized by my colleagues at the university (Timimi and Kovacs 2007). It is thus by taking part in series of research projects developed within the framework of inter-institutional networks of researchers brought together by common questions that I had the opportunity, stimulated by these exchanges, to gradually problematize the schema of the trace1: in particular, but not exclusively, the ICS research projects funded by media metamorphoses2, the Franco-Brazilian network Médiations et usages sociaux des savoirs et de l’information (MUSSI) led by Viviane Couzinet and Regina Marteleto and the interdisciplinary program “L’homme trace” led by Béatrice Galinon-Mélénec and Sylvie Leleu-Merviel; they were opportunities for numerous scientific debates and publications3. All of these exchanges have led me to appreciate the complexity and scope of the issues raised by the trace in the most diverse fields such as that of the psyche, health, corporeal disciplines, the archaeological, historical and geographical sciences, and the engineering of information devices. This has engendered an immense space of possibilities for exchanges within the L’homme trace network, along with several invitations to conferences organized by other disciplines (engineering, history, geography, literature) and my participation in the Transformations du numérique/par le numérique project at the University of Sorbonne, which have constantly furthered my explorations. Finally, the doctoral theses I supervised and those I was given the opportunity to read during doctoral defenses played a decisive role in identifying the scientific and political stakes of research of traces. In this fertile scientific polyphony I have chosen, for my part, to focus on a relatively limited question, that of the mediated traces of the social world: traces produced via media devices that claim to reflect aspects of society and culture. In the first chapter of this book I will give a more precise definition of the limits of this field. At the initiative of Sylvie Leleu-Merviel, scientific director of the ISTE’s Trace collection, I undertook to gather and structure these questions accumulated over the years into a book.

1 This term is discussed in section 1.3. 2 Published in Souchier, Jeanneret and Le Marec (2003); Tardy and Jeanneret (2007); and Davallon (2012). 3 In particular, the four volumes entitled L’homme-trace (Galinon-Mélénec 2011; GalinonMélénec and Zlitni 2013; Galinon-Mélénec, Liénard and Zlitni 2015; Galinon-Mélénec 2017), issue 59 of the Intellectica magazine (Mille 2013) and Sylvie Leleu-Merviel’s book Informational Tracking (2018).

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However, it soon became clear to me that the task was considerable and that it could hardly be carried out within a single book. There are two main reasons for this. On the one hand, the effort to explain a theoretical problematic of the trace, even though it is to be reduced to mediated traces of the social world, has proved much more difficult than expected, both in terms of the realities to be taken into account and the theories to be discussed. This is the case, notably, if we do not intend to prefigure the work based solely on the questions that history puts forward today, which in my opinion would be a serious scientific and political error. On the other hand, as I tried to identify the current political dimension of research, I observed both a constant and diversified process of innovation, enough to cause vertigo, in the creation of tools for producing and processing traces, particularly on the part of the dominant actors in the media industries; and an astonishing productivity in empirical work devoted to social logic, professional situations and precise “branding tools”, particularly in doctoral researches and in ICS. I therefore intend to describe and question in the near future, less partially than I have done so far in a series of articles, the current, extremely diversified and complex forms taken by current mechanisms of social traceability. I plan to do this work later, alone or with others, in a new book. However, it seemed to me more urgent and necessary today to carry out observations in order to develop fundamental tools for an analysis of the media production of the trace that is not confined to the dominant forms of this process, while allowing us to approach current events with sufficient objectivity. I have, therefore, chosen to work in this book to construct an explicit conceptualization of how the idea of the trace could give rise to media constructions, taking advantage of the temporal distance and the readings of works that have structured how we come to think about traces. This book is based on the conviction that without this dual perspective, historical and theoretical, the anthropo-social research community may be able to nurture the changes underway, but without truly understanding what is at stake. It consists of a work of problematization, conducted in stages, through confrontations of particularly explicit texts, specifically accomplished methodological initiatives and socio-political mechanisms that demonstrate the powers of a mediatized trace. Without excluding the current state of the political and symbolic economy of the media – often referred to as digital – this investigation is not limited to it, but seeks to place it in the perspective of older practices, theories and frameworks. However, while taking a communicative approach, this volume will attempt to make the most of a reading of works borrowed from a wide range of disciplines, from history to philosophy, literary studies, socioanthropology, language sciences and aesthetics.

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This book is structured into four chapters. Chapter 1 defines more precisely the space, scope and limits of this reflection by identifying the object of study: mediatized traces of the social world. It highlights the mediations to be taken into account in order not to assimilate this social production of traces as a natural phenomenon. Chapter 2 develops the notion of the schema of the trace, in order to highlight a particular socio-semiotic process which particularly involves indexical reasoning in a specific logic of which photography constitutes the social archetype. It questions the paradox of a sign that seems to be self-evident while its interpretation is extremely complex. Chapter 3 examines a particular type of trace, the written trace, considered as the prototype of the gesture of inscription, with the aim of understanding the privileged status that it has been led to occupy in the life of a culture and its reflection on the historical construction of this status. It shows that, if writing is first and foremost marked by its ability to externalize, record and disseminate thought, its character as a trace is not self-evident and raises multiple issues. Chapter 4 examines how the most complex and richest of media constructions can be used to serve a society of traces: texts becoming traces. It endeavors to show the poetic, complex and responsible nature of this activity. The overall ambition of this volume and the path it proposes though a social and intellectual history is to participate in the scientific debate by providing avenues for analyzing current events, while avoiding taking for granted that the life of traces in the social sphere must necessarily take the forms that the industries of media capitalism favor today. I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of Dominique Cotte who, until the end of his short life, did not stop sharing with me his penetrating reflections on the epistemological criticism of the categories of information analysis. I would like to thank my colleagues who have given me the opportunity to develop this reflection through numerous invitations to seminars, symposia and teachings in France and abroad, and the young researchers who have honored me by sharing with me, as part of their doctoral studies, reflections that have greatly contributed to the maturation of the questions presented here. I wish to thank Béatrice Galinon-Mélénec, Sylvie Leleu-Merviel and Adeline Wrona who all supported this project over the years, as well as Dominique Jeanneret who accepted that it took up too much of my time and thoughts. This book owes much to those who agreed to read all or part of it: Julia Bonaccorsi, Fausto Colombo, Jean Davallon, Maria-Giulia Dondero, Jean-Jacques Franckel, Sarah Labelle, David Martens and Aude Seurrat as well as the translation team at ISTE. I also thank Sylvie Leleu-Merviel and Michel Labour for having reread and improved the English version of the book.

1 The Mediatized Trace of the Social World, the Object of Research

This initial chapter states the purpose of the research presented in this book, distinguishing it from other possible research on traces and defining a stance towards a term that circulates in social discourse of all kinds. It is a question of transforming a concrete object of contemporary information-communication, the production and treatment of traces of the social world, into an object of research (Davallon in Jeanneret and Ollivier 2004, pp. 30–37). This research puts forwards the scientific study of an object that is not itself a scientific concept, but is what I call a cultural being. By this deliberately fuzzy and flexible expression, I mean a complexity that associates material objects, texts and representations, leading to the sharing of ideas, information, knowledge1, and judgments. The importance of this type of research object lies in the fact that it plays a role in: “[…] the historical elaboration of the resources and challenges of culture for a society: stances, knowledge, values, which cannot be understood without one another and which are based on a panoply of objects and procedures, without however being reduced to this single technical inventory” (Jeanneret 2008a, p. 16). This is the case with the term “trace” and the powerful movement to create devices for collecting and processing traces that we witness: in my opinion, they play a major role in the development of resources and challenges for our society and even affect the definition of society. It is, therefore, a question of understanding how

1 In this work, "knowledge" refers to savoir in the French version of the text and "personal knowledge" refers to connaissance in the original text.

The Trace Factory, First Edition. Yves Jeanneret. © ISTE Ltd 2020. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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it is possible to produce, capture and process traces of the social world; or, to be clearer, to analyze all the devices, discourses, objects and processes that lead to qualifying certain representations of the social world as traces. The reader will have noted the distance, even the uneasiness, that marks my relationship to the word “trace”. Indeed, this study will not avoid a paradox that lies in wait for any research on the development and circulation of a cultural being: “it is necessary to recognize the existence of cultural beings in society, without artificially reifying or limiting them” (Jeanneret 2008a, p. 15). What we call “traces” in our society are extremely disparate, as we will see in detail below. Let us say at the outset that we must renounce the idea of giving it a fixed definition or comprehending it by means of a single concept. Precision in the analysis of historical social constructs – and the trace is a historical social construct – is paid for by accepting a certain vagueness in their definition. It would, therefore, be a mistake to undertake this research with the aim of transforming trace into a concept, i.e. to confer on all the social constructs associated with the idea of trace a unique theoretical status, which would amount to transforming circulating representations into scientific knowledge. “The risk for the researcher is then to believe that they will find within the actors ‘personal knowledge’ of the object, thus dispensing him or her purely and simply from building a research object, since this knowledge already exists within this object itself” (Davallon in Jeanneret and Ollivier, p. 32). The trace is, therefore, approached here as a configuration of objects, utterances and ideas that has a certain consistency, but which must be problematized – and, therefore, studied with concepts that are in some ways external to it. Nevertheless, it is a question of taking these constructs seriously, of not treating them as pure illusions, which would lead to not understanding them and above all not thinking about their existence and social impact. I assume that, despite the considerable dispersion of objects related to the idea of trace, something is at stake in this circulation and in these inventions. In a way, the purpose of this book is to test this hypothesis. In short, we must understand why these traces are not quite, or not only, traces (in the physical sense of the term) in order to describe the life of the trace as a cultural being; and, at the same time, we must recognize a meaning in this crystallization of diverse objects around the idea of trace, which I do by assuming that a certain regime of social representation is at work through this ongoing project. In short, the difficulty I encounter here was perfectly expressed by Roland Barthes in the last pages of the postface to Mythologies, entitled “Myth Today”, where he described the “unstable grasp of reality”: “[…] we constantly sail between the object and its demystification, powerless to make it whole: for if we penetrate the object, we liberate

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it but we just destroy it; and, if we leave it its weight, we respect it, but we leave it still mystified […]” (Barthes 2002 [1957], p. 868)2. I ask the reader to accept this unstable grasp of the trace. This book will deal with traces that are not traces in the sense that physicists give to this term and maps that are not maps according to the definition of geographers: it will be a question of understanding why these objects are not (quite) what they claim to be, and also why they can make such claims and what the effects of this effective claim are. We must accept playing the game of this oscillation between deconstruction and reconstruction of the object in which we are interested. Thus, in the following sections, the idea of the trace will be confronted with concepts constructed within the theoretical framework of ICS, such as index, inscription and writing, and it will sometimes even have to be replaced by them to lead to well-stated questions; however, it will nonetheless be constructed as a specific object of research, because it is not reduced to any one of these concepts. First, I would like to assess the wide range of objects, discourses and postures that can today be associated with the trace object; on this basis, I will endeavor to define the concrete object to which the research specifically relates, the traces of social practices embodied in media devices. Then, I will begin an initial approach into the specificity of this object, using the results of historical research and based on readings, to define an initial conceptual constellation in order to establish a problem statement. Finally, I will address the question of situating the stance and aim of the research that addresses the trace (category and schema) in terms of efficiency with regard to research that aims to ensure its scientific relevance. 1.1. There are traces and traces I have chosen to start, here, from a very concrete example by considering a set of objects that have the particularity of being commonly defined as the traces of a social3 practice and that show in a particularly spectacular way the metamorphoses of such an object and its great heterogeneity. I wish to first make an inventory of this protean set by asking myself at each step what can justify this qualification – whose relevance I will not discuss at this stage. This example has the merit of allowing a 2 Texts by Barthes included in the Œuvres complètes published by Le Seuil are cited in this edition, with the mention in square brackets of the date of first publication. The reference will also be given in square brackets for texts whose original publication date is important for analysis. It will be omitted in other cases. 3 I will study further on the processes of attributing the quality of traces to objects. I ask the reader, here, to accept the observation that all the objects mentioned commonly receive the qualification of trace, a statement based on observations concerning the social life of this type of object.

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precise examination of the transformations undergone by the idea of trace when it passes from the physical world to the social world and from the space of direct observation to mediation by communication, information and documentation devices and actors. This will allow me to establish a set of fundamental distinctions, to define an initial set of concepts and to specify to the reader which of these objects is the object of the research – which is not intended to analyze all and every type of trace. 1.1.1. The avatars of a trace of use The chosen example concerns testimonies that can be found of a practice relating to a cultural object, what is commonly called a trace of use. We will have to critically examine this expression, but let us adopt it for the time being. Let us say that it is a set of concrete objects which, in one way or another, bear witness to this practice4. In the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome there is a statue of the saint which has the peculiarity of presenting one foot which is almost totally worn away, to the point of being unrecognizable5. This example is of particular interest to us because it has in a sense both a physical and a social face, and thus crystallizes several modes of existence of the trace, highlighting their kinship and differences. Indeed, as a material object, the statue shows a change in its appearance that is quite similar to that of many other objects that have worn over time: a transformation that results in what is called patina, an erosion of matter that is accompanied by a change in the appearance of the surface. The unusually smooth, distorted and shiny physical appearance of these objects draws our attention to their relationship to time. There is, however, patina and patina. Some patinas are strictly natural, such as the one that characterizes those stones that have been rolled downstream by torrents, compared to the sharp ones that have just come off the mountains in the bed of the glaciers. Sometimes, and this is the case here, the patina not only indicates (natural) wear and tear but also (human) use. This may be ordinary wear and tear, similar to that of an ordinary utensil made of rather fragile material: for example, keys on a computer keyboard or the handle of a door, suggesting fairly common use. In this case, it is clear that it is something else: the condition of the statue attests to the exceptional duration and intensity of the use of very many anonymous people, as is the case for some stones in passages that have been used for centuries, for example the stairs of very busy monuments or the pavement of Roman roads. 4 Passages marked by a border are dedicated to the analysis of concrete situations and devices. 5 A first version of this analysis was presented in Jeanneret (2013) from a limited corpus, which has over time been diversified and augmented up until the present.

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However, the interpretation of use is even more complex in the case of the statue, because the exceptional nature of this phenomenon immediately suggests a particular practice, without being as easy to understand as a simple passage, which would undoubtedly be the zero degree of the interpretation of a trace. The worn and shiny appearance of bronze (its patina) can easily be noticed and interpreted as an indication of the considerable volume and duration of a use, if by this we mean a set of gestures constituting a widely shared behavior. The visual aspect of the material is a sign that refers both to the “thickness” of time and to the density of uses: “as a phenomenon, patina is […] the expression of ‘passing time’ and of use, inscribed on the outer surface of objects” (Fontanille 2004, p. 245). In fact, beyond this or that limited gesture, it is an elaborate practice on which history has had a transformative effect. A practice that has evolved considerably and has been charged with meaning and values: much more, for example, than knowing how to follow a path or open a door. A practice that includes an obvious and an enigmatic part. This is what Mary Carruthers calls “orthopraxis” (Carruthers 2002): a way of doing things that is linked to a culture and field of belief that has largely become commonplace and implicit, starting with attending Mass in churches and St. Peter’s Basilica in particular. As in the case of worn paving stones, wear and tear can be interpreted as a trace of use; however, here, the nature of this use is more unusual and more enigmatic. It is highly uncertain and has been affected by profound historical changes. Let us say that it is a use linked to a complex social practice. Let us now move on to a new stage by considering the collection of the many printed and digital documents that mark this statue as a curiosity. These are also, it will be said, traces of a use. But this time, the use is described and represented. Travel guides provide an explicit expression of the idea of a material trace of a social use and also place this use in the context of a cultural regime, i.e. tourism. Without analyzing all of this production, I present, as an example, four comparable but slightly different formulations of such a leitmotiv of the trace of use in tourist guides: “the right foot is almost worn out by being kissed by the faithful” (Baedeker Guide 1905); “eaten away by pilgrims’ kisses” (Routard Guide 1999); “many visitors come to touch the foot of the statue” (Autrement Guide 2000); “worn down by the devotion of pilgrims” (Guide Voir 2005). These formulations are related but unique. Such a work of written mediation6 of the trace is not specific to the publishing industry. We may also find on the Internet comments by network users posted under pseudonyms, like this one: “One may also pass in front of the thin statue of Peter (13th century) with his feet worn out by the caresses of pilgrims who follow one another ridiculously in their shared goal”7. In addition, some Internet users go so far 6 The concept is further defined in section 1.1.2. 7 Posting entitled “San Pietro n’est pas piètre ***** licorne66, 29/08/2007 17.46”. Accessed April 18, 2012. Currently unavailable.

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as to devote a series of articles in their blog to analyzing this phenomenon and even to stigmatizing it, such as the author of the blog Jack aime, Jack n’aime pas, who wrote on August 8, 2011: “I have already told you (click here) about this statue of Saint Peter in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, whose feet are the object of attacks by visitors (pilgrims?). I have even already shown you the statue ‘in all its glory’ (you definitely have to go click here). But I had not shown you the effect that these assaults had on the feet of the statue, especially on the right foot (his right foot), the one that we are advised to touch, probably to do like the pagans who were to touch the right foot of the statues of their gods, to worship them, or their monarch, to signify to him their total submission. You can see this effect in the picture above, which I have finally found8”. Some blogs take the form of an organized genre, the travel journal, creating what can be called a deliberate mediation of use. This is the case of the site Les voyages de Surtsey: voyager, visiter, goûter, a notebook kept by an Internet user and hosted successively on several “blogging” platforms, which explicitly expresses its role as an intermediary for the transmission of lived experiences. It contains a combined description of the object and its uses similar to the previous one, but nevertheless different in tone and conclusion: “In the nave, a few people line up in front of a famous bronze statue of Saint Peter holding the key to heaven, dating from the 13th century. In turn, the faithful will touch or even kiss his right foot, which is a little worn. A somewhat mystical reverence, but you get caught up in the game”9. Here, we can see the role that development of the media can play in the collection and transmission of traces of use: the existence of online networks allows, much more than printed publishing, the multiplication of “voices” (of these different enunciations) that combine in varied ways the description of the object, that of past and present practices, the interpretations of gestures, judgments and recommendations. The development of so-called participatory media and Web 2.0 has led to the production of anthologies (Doueihi 2008, pp. 69–72) of posts that can be seen both as engines for disseminating traces of uses of all kinds – and, therefore, as accelerators in the adoption of these uses – and as the expression of diverse 8 Blog “Jack aime/n’aime pas”, post of August 8, 2011, accessed October 11, 2011. Available at: http://jackaimejacknaimepas.blogspot.com/2011/08/estropier-pour-obtenir-le-salut.html?m=1. The words “click here” printed in brackets were originally hyperlinks. 9 Available at: http://surtsey.canalblog.com/archives/2015/03/13/31686707.html. Accessed October 15, 2018.

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stances towards the object as well as the practices related to it. Thus, on the Tripadvisor industrial tourism platform, the following post titles can be seen: “À voir” (To see) – “Au passage” (In passing) – “Toucher” (Touch) – “Nous ne toucherons plus le pied de Saint-Pierre” (We will no longer touch St. Peter’s foot) – “Touchez-lui le pied” (Touch his foot)10. We could say that all these small written publications describe and comment on the use that they define. They illustrate a certain power acquired by the media to create memories. But writing – handwritten, printed or computerized – is not the only medium that bears the trace of this set of practices. For example, there are two paintings in French museums that give an image of visitors and the gestures they make in front of and on the statue: a drawing from the 18th Century attributed without certainty to Hubert Robert, which is kept in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tours with the caption Les pèlerins à la basilique Saint-Pierre de Rome and a painting by Léon Bonnat in 1864 entitled Pèlerins au pied de la statue de Saint Pierre dans l’église Saint-Pierre de Rome, part of the collection of the Musée Bonnat-Helleu de Bayonne. In addition, there are photographs online by Internet users who have “immortalized” crowds of visitors queuing at or touching the statue11, in addition to countless photographs of the statue itself, which can also be considered as a record of the visits of their authors and more generally of the fact that this object has acquired the status of a curiosity on the Web.

Figure 1.1. Pèlerins au pied de la statue de Saint Pierre dans l’église Saint-Pierre de Rome (Pilgrims at the Foot of the Statue of Saint Peter) by Léon Bonnat, Bayonne, Bonnat-Helleu Museum (© Bayonne, Bonnat-Helleu museum, photo: A. Vaquero) 10 Available at: https://www.tripadvisor.fr/ShowUserReviews-g187793-d195266-r430310166St_Peter_Enthroned-Vatican_City_Lazio.html. Accessed October 28, 2018. 11 For example: http://akai-inthesky.blogspot.com/2014/11/rome-jour-3-partie-2-tu-es-pierreet.html (see Figure 1.1). Accessed October 28, 2018.

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This evocation of a few avatars of a trace of use would not be accurate if I did not specify that many of the objects mentioned above were revealed to me through research online: for example, the drawing and painting are easily identifiable and their image can be downloaded, because the museums have created a presentation of their collection on an industrial platform, Webmuseo, developed by the Lille-based agency A&A, which specializes in creating “software solutions” for museums12. Here, we broach a thorny question: the role of digital data processing software and of the actors, industrialists and activists who manufacture them in the circulation of traces. 1.1.2. Metamorphoses of the trace All the documents of all kinds that have been mentioned, from the moment we departed from simple observation of the object to enter into its different representations, ensure a mediation of the trace. What does this mediation consist of? Above all, the trace moves from the realm of lived experience to that of inscription upon a mediatized surface. Therefore, rather than being the subject of direct experience, it is indirectly represented in a document. First, it is brought to the attention of the public by virtue of access to a writing with documentary status. In addition, as such, it can circulate more widely. To be precise: it is its representation that circulates, i.e. a set of signs that take its place at a distance and in its absence. Throughout this book, we will try to understand how and why this appears to be so. From there, the representation of the object gives an explicit character to its status as a trace of a social practice. The texts not only mention the existence of the patina, but also give an interpretation. In addition, it can be seen that this interpretation can vary greatly. The physical appearance of the object is transformed into an indication of human behavior (wear and tear is transformed into a trace of use) when the narrative describes a gesture and thus this enigmatic sign takes on a social meaning. The patina makes visible, in the physical material of the object, the accumulation of gestures over the course of an immemorial history. But what gestures? Here, our texts diverge: touching, caressing, kissing, assaulting, nibbling? The image becomes thicker as part of a broader narrative scenario. Are they pilgrims? Believers? Visitors? Is their gesture one of veneration? Devotion? Worship? Submission? Superstition? Is it mystical, respectable, sheep-like, ridiculous? Little by little, we have slipped imperceptibly from the observation of something observable, evoking a physical process, to a value judgment, passing through an object of interest, a scenario of practice, a cultural qualification and a figuration of the social world. 12 Available at: http://www.aa-partners.com/webmuseo-solution-logicielle-pour-les-collections. Accessed October 28, 2018.

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All these observations concern the triviality of the trace of use: the fact that it circulates on different media and that as it circulates it takes on meaning and value. It therefore becomes increasingly complex. But two important points must be added. First, the use of a medium is reflexive: it says something about the person who uses it and the possibilities of the device. Hence, from the moment a trace of use is the subject of mediation, the act of mediation itself can create a trace. The document is not only the mediation of a trace existing outside it; the existence of a media document itself can be considered a trace of the conditions under which it was produced and the attitudes of those who produced it. Which is to say that which can make a trace multiply and disperse. All these texts say something not only about the gestures of visitors, but also about the act of writing by their author and the nature of its medium: the tourist guide reflects a certain social regime of travel and the state of the publishing industry, and the blog expresses through its conception and style a form of relationship to culture. As for the very fact of keeping a blog, it is a sign of a certain way of communicating online. For an observer interested in the evolution of social practices, this blog is the mediation of a usage of religion and tourism, and also a trace in itself of a cultural norm, a practice of writing and a use of the network. On the contrary, each new medium of mediation not only modifies the diffusion and meaning of the trace. It affects the very nature of what we consider to be a trace. The study of this process will occupy almost the entire book. For the moment, let us just measure its importance by considering a few examples. When we observe the wear and tear of bronze, the phenomenon we observe is physical (even though its origin is social): passers-by have directly affected the material of the statue. On the contrary, all the testimonies appearing on a medium of transmission have required the action of collecting and representing the statue and its use. In the two cases, we cannot speak in the same sense of a trace. It can be said, on a provisional basis, that the patina is a physical imprint of time, but that all the documents have resulted from a human gesture of inscription. However, a physical footprint does not make a trace like a human inscription. Finally, the signs that bear a representation do not have the same relationship to the practices to which they refer. Stories are constructed by their authors and endowed with meaning by their readers: they describe and comment on a social use and thus explicitly attribute meaning and value to it. The painting does something else, perhaps more: it makes a scene present to our eyes and, therefore, if we can say so, it determines figures and gestures. This is also the case of a photograph. However, a painting does not make a trace in the same way as a photograph, because it is put together by the human hand and eye: it bears witness to a practice, but it does not reproduce it in the same way as photograph, which records reality

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through a technological process. All this deserves to be detailed later, but we can at this stage be satisfied with recognizing the heterogeneity of what constitutes a trace. 1.1.3. Mediation, mediatization, device Let us summarize. We have observed three major discontinuities. Firstly, there is the distinction between objects that can be interpreted because of their natural link with the phenomena they reveal, such as the rock rolled by the river13, and those that acquire the status of traces of social uses through more or less complex scenarios of practice. Then there is the fact that the process of producing the trace is not at all the same when it comes to directly observable imprints left on objects as compared to the trace as the result of gestures of inscription and mediatization linked to the material manipulation of signs by human beings. Finally, we have highlighted the technical ruptures that render the mode of presence of objects and practices strongly influenced by the evolution of technology, and the fact that a painting cannot be a trace of social practice in the same way as a photograph. At this point, it is necessary to establish a clear vocabulary in order to explore this issue further. The one I will use is borrowed from ICS. With regard to the previous example, I will talk about mediation to designate the social act by which the object of interest (here, the foot of the statue) can be identified, collected, interpreted and shared (e.g. by the Guide du routard or by the blog), whilst mediatization designates the fact that this act involves a material and technological device: in this case, on the one hand, the use of industrial printing and, on the other hand, the practice of computer networks. The term device will refer to the material process by which this mediatization is carried out, the use of a more or less complex technical object that organizes and structures our exchanges in terms of resources of expression (words, images) and of roles (a recommendation). To illustrate the use of these three terms, we can remain in the field of tourism and refer to the invention of the first tourist guides14. When publishers made this important industrial innovation, they wanted to justify it. One of the first guides devoted to Paris reads as follows: “It is only natural that a foreigner who visits a large city, and who has neither the time nor the intention to make a long visit, should be accompanied by someone from among the inhabitants who can indicate to him what is most interesting and curious to see in the city 13 This does not mean, however, that their interpretation is not the result of a construction like any other interpretation of a trace (Leleu-Merviel 2017). This is discussed further in Chapter 2. 14 For a more complete analysis, see Jeanneret (2014b).

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that he wishes to get to know as quickly as possible. Hence the origin and usefulness of the cicerones found in all the cities of Italy, who are commissioned by their antiquities, monuments or modern establishments. Hence, the need to compensate for the lack of intelligent cicerones among us with portable books in which we find more or less well made notices concerning palaces, churches, museums, etc.” (Peguegnot 1855). Here, we see the publisher referring to an older professional practice of mediation, that of the physical guide (a more or less improvised artisanal mediation) to justify the innovation of publishing a printed guide, i.e. the industrial production of a new type of device, of a mediatized genre. This example also shows that not all social mediation necessarily involves technological mediatization, but that all technological media coverage involves social mediation (Davallon and Le Marec 2000; Mœglin 2005). At the end of this brief exploration of the extent of variation in the notion of trace – which is far from exhaustive – the conditions are set to identify a specific research object: the analysis of traces of the social work that are produced through media devices. It is essentially a question of understanding in what capacity these different productions receive the status of traces, how they are produced and what part the creation of representation and communication devices takes, in what way they contribute to generating a representation and a conception of society. Symmetrically, it is useful to specify what this book will not talk about. It will not be about how human beings create devices to study the nature or conditions under which a situation of direct communication (not mediated by a device) can be established through traces. The chemistry of printing, the detection of geological or meteorological phenomena, the authentication of works, police investigation, the diagnosis of medical symptoms and the observation of signs of character in the behavior of an individual in a situation have no place here – whatever may be the interest of these questions – and are dealt with by other researchers, in particular within the framework of the collection dedicated to the human trace. These limitations are linked to the idea that understanding the mediatized traces of social life is already, in itself, a considerable challenge. From now on, when the word “trace” is used, it will refer to objects and processes that have two claims: to reflect social life (including culture in this definition) and to do so through media devices. This will be the case with one exception: the development devoted to the semiotics of the index (section 2.1), which must consider all types of indices to provide us with appropriate theoretical concepts.

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1.2. The social trace as a problem: the legacy of the history of the book As mentioned above, the processes by which an object is assigned the status of a trace may be profoundly different, so different that the word “trace” comes to refer to phenomena that are entirely foreign to each other. To move forward in the analysis, it is essential to ask ourselves what we do when we talk specifically about a trace with regard to objects that circulate in the media: objects that belong not only to the physical world but also to the social world and that come to us at the end of a mediatization process. To build this theoretical framework, upon which the book is based, I will start from the way in which it has been developed by historians of books, published and read, whether learned or popular. Indeed, the questions raised by these researchers and the problems they encounter particularly enlighten us because they had to place a critique of the trace at the very heart of their approach in order to conduct their investigation15. 1.2.1. From book to reading In recent decades, the history of books has undergone a major transformation linked to two major orientations: on the one hand, not only focusing on the form of books as objects, but also seeking to capture reading as a practice; on the other hand, setting aside quantitative data on reading alone in an attempt to qualitatively understand ways of reading. Consequently, as the founders of this movement explain, “the study of the object, far from confining the history of the book to a somewhat vain descriptive erudition, actually introduces a better understanding of book practices and historical variations in the act of reading” (Chartier and Martin 1982, p. 10). We read alone or in groups, aloud or in silence, in extenso or in fragments, etc. But how can we grasp this act? Working on the past, historians are led to look for clues in objects of a culture: ways of doing things, expectations, norms of the relationship that an era has with its books. In addition, this difficulty encountered by historical research is precisely what interests us here. In itself, the historical evolution of these practices is inaccessible to the historian. The latter, like the hunter or the detective (Ginzburg 1989), will try to track the traces of what she or he wants to analyze. From all this, the form of books, which has evolved considerably throughout history, can certainly provide some clues. That is how:

15 For a more in-depth analysis of the contribution of book history and reading to ICS, summarized here, see Jeanneret (2008a, pp. 63–74).

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“[…] the history of books can no longer avoid readings, partly inscribed in the object itself, which define the possibilities of appropriation, but partly also borne by the culture of those who read and give meaning, but a meaning which is their own, to the materials read” (Chartier and Martin 1982, p. 11). We understand that historians were in a way condemned to look within the book (within the media system) for traces of reading (of a usage): this happened from the moment they decided not to content themselves with describing objects, but to understand a process, reading – linking the book to reading, to use Roger Chartier’s words (1993). They explained, for example, how the appearance of the title, the creation of indexes, the choice of collection catalogues and typography materialized “figures of reading” (Chartier 1993, p. 89). They made the material volume and editorial production the trace of a use. Indeed, “of these plural practices, personal knowledge is undoubtedly forever inaccessible since no archive keeps track of it. Most often, the only indication of the use of the book is the book itself”: this, concludes the historian, defines “the severe limits imposed on any history of reading, but also its compelling seduction” (p. 111). In fact, as Arlette Farge (1989, pp. 18–19) explains, the historian cannot escape the “physical pleasure of the trace found […] as if the proof of what was the past was finally there, definitive and close. As if, by unfolding the archive, we had the privilege of ‘touching the real’”. However, Farge only signals this temptation in order to defend itself from it. Understanding this appeal and its limits is a major requirement for us. This is precisely the purpose of the present book. In effect, as we will see below, the practices that we expect concerning the traces of contemporary media are also inaccessible to the eye, and not (always) because of historical distance, but because of the unprecedented range of their dissemination. So that here again, it is very appealing but no less risky to hope to grasp them, or even track them down, through the traces they leave. Let us, therefore, examine historians engaged in production of the trace of a use, i.e. reading16. Our aim, here, will not be to assess their scientific criteria – which we will have to examine (section 4.2) as an indexical study into social realities – but to understand the problems they face, and which we will certainly face as well. We will limit ourselves, here, to observing three things: what historians refer to as traces; how this term makes sense for them in relation to certain major concepts; and what are the aporias that this research helps to identify.

16 This is the re-reading, within the ambit of the present book, of a series of works that have guided my research over time and that concern the relationship of historians to the archive, the history of reading and the history of scholarly practices.

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Historians use the word “trace” a lot. This is the case, for example, when it comes to the status of archival documents (Farge 1989), the resources of historical investigation (Chartier 1993) or the relationship between the text and its readers (Jacob 2002). As these examples show, it is a term with a heuristic function that aims to characterize a pressing issue. Above all, it is a question of traces when it comes to the very issue of historical research. As we have seen, this is Chartier’s concern, who proposes a method “combining, on the one hand, the reading protocols specific to different groups of readers and, on the other hand, the traces and representations of their practices” (Chartier 1993, p. 93). It is above all the lack of direct access to personal knowledge of practices that leads to the books or paintings of painters being qualified as the place where traces are collected. This phenomenon does not escape those who comment on the endeavor, who systematically place it under the sign of the trace: “it is a question here of distinguishing the modalities of appropriation of cultural materials, through the uses and usages of the book. The difficulty is to find its traces” (Le Men 1986, p. 101). The trace is, therefore, inhabited in a way by the historian’s desire, who sees in it an object awaiting interpretation, while being very conscious of the way in which this interpretation must be controlled: “Traces by the thousands are the dream of every researcher… We feel both the strength of the content and its impossible deciphering, its illusory restitution. Tension is organized – often in conflict – between the passion to gather it all, to present it to be read in its entirety, to play with its spectacular side and its unlimited content, and reason, which requires that it be finely questioned for it to make sense” (Farge 1989, p. 22). However numerous they may be, traces are still too rare for the historian, especially those that can give access to a popular but widespread practice. The trace focuses attention only because it is recognized as the ability to reveal things that are not themselves visible: not only to the extent that they have disappeared, but also because they have not been the subject of a deliberate act of inscription. In the review cited above, Le Men observes that as we move from scholarly reading to ordinary reading and then to popular reading, the trace becomes increasingly rare, and also increasingly crucial. Like the archives of trials, the humble traces bear witness to realities to which society did not confer public status17. If the idea of trace is omnipresent, it is, therefore, both because some practices were not considered

17 This question is further explored in relation to the “indexical paradigm” (see section 4.2.2).

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memorable enough to give rise to inscription and because, when inscription took place, it was not necessarily voluntary. The unintentionally recorded trace then testifies within the text to a singular local practice that it inscribes in the materiality of the book. It becomes a sign of the reader’s active character, of the fact that the reader him- or herself appropriates the text and manipulates it. The historian of antiquity Christian Jacob, who led a collective research project on the history of scholarly practices, places this status of the trace in the perspective of Michel de Certeau’s theory of uses (1990), by taking up the images of the latter who represents the user as an actor who poaches and moves within the territory of the text. In this case, the trace embodies the tension between the order of the text, more or less imposed by the publisher and the author, and the freedom of the reader: “Through reading, two topographies seek an impossible encounter: the first is given, materialized, encoded in the text, resulting from an authorial or editorial will. The second is that of the pilgrim, of his stopping points, of the places where he slows down, where he presses the pace, jumps steps, goes back or digresses […] To peregrinate is also to leave traces in the spaces that we travel” (Jacob 2002, pp. 16–17).

1.2.2. A constellation of categories Finally, the trace expresses above all the historian’s problematic view of a process whose complex, historical and conflictual nature is measured by the historian but is not observed as such, and is only grasped through what the objects can reveal. For the historian, the trace is both a provocation and an enigma. Hence, in the history of reading, the trace only functions in alternation and echoes with a constellation of categories that transform this appealing and enigmatic object into a problem. In reading the texts, we can identify a set of terms that somehow collectively construct the conceptual scope of the trace. I will clarify the choice of terminology: I consider the use of terms as the expression of interlinked categories. I advance the hypothesis that the system of relationships that unites these categories within a problem is a concept for historical research. I hold on to the term trace as a sign of the problem thus described. I will seek to show later that it is not a concept, but a schema, which gives rise to various figurations.

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For this analysis, I retain, here, the programmatic text delivered 35 years ago by Chartier at the founding symposium of research on reading practices (1993)18. In this conference, alongside five occurrences of the term “trace” (in French, or “trace” in English) – in fact quite rare, but always in a strategic position – we find the terms “pratique/pratiquer” (“(a) practice/(to) practice)” 11 times, “inscrire/inscription” (“inscribe/inscription”) eight times, “form” (understood as the material “form” of the texts) seven times, “usage/usager” (“use/user”) seven times and “indice” (“index”) five times (and “indication/indicator” twice). These terms are all used, in different proportions, in most historical works on reading practices, such as in the collective Des Alexandries following the symposium held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1999 (Jacob 2002). I will cover these categories in an appropriate order to construct the problem in a simple way, but the reader should remember that the categories are interdependent and not hierarchical categories. The word trace applies in history and more generally in the social sciences to a wide range of objects, some of which have nothing to do with the question of reading; it is no less obvious that its frequency is linked here to the specific problem of research, which consists of seeking clues to a cultural practice that takes shape through the encounter with a medium. Above all, it defines a structural link between the idea of trace and that of inscription, which must be understood first and foremost in the elementary sense of the term in documentation sciences: “the smallest document is an inscription” (Otlet 1934, p. 43). In the historian’s work, the trace/inscription dyad embodies more precisely what documentation theorist Jean Meyriat calls the “document by attribution”: inscriptions that have not been intentionally recorded but are subsequently attributed an informational value by their user (Meyriat 1981). The historian makes the trace an object of information by giving it the role of an indication of a field of practice. In other words, the success of the term trace is related to the fact that it can refer to both inscription and index. We, therefore, have an initial definition of the trace: an inscription that can have the value of an index. In Chartier, the term “form” is frequently associated with inscription. Indeed, the study gives particular indexical status to the forms of the text, which the historian addresses, as we have seen above, in interaction with the gestures and values of reading. The indices that the investigation is looking for not only relate to the content of the documents, but also to their form, and, today in ICS, to their format, if we mean by this a materialized form, produced in an industrial technological process and manipulated by users. What justifies the importance of forms? Precisely the fact

18 This text, first published in 1985, was the result of a conference given in September 1983 during the Pratiques de la lecture (Reading Practices) symposium in Saint-Maximin (France).

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that the study takes into account the mediatized nature of the book, the fact that its material form conditions the resources, roles and procedures of communication, that mediatization by itself can make a trace, as we have seen above with guides and the blog. This first network of categories allows us to specify the analysis. When historians speak of traces, they constitute as their research objects the inscriptions found in the book medium and attribute informational value to these inscriptions, to their textual content and also to their material form. They thus assimilate the inscription to the status of a document by assigning it a posteriori. This is perfectly summarized by Chartier’s initial formula: “This text would, above all, question the conditions of possibility of a history of practices, made difficult both by the rarity of direct traces and by the complexity of interpreting indirect indices” (Chartier 1993, p. 79). We will have to return (in Chapter 2) to the fact that in reality no trace is ever direct; however, we must undoubtedly understand this opposition between “direct trace” and “indirect index” based on the distinction proposed by another information theorist, Robert Escarpit, between event and document. The historian has no direct access to the events of reading (what people actually did when they were reading) and must rely on the indirect testimony of the document understood as “an accumulation of fixed and permanent traces” that “remain available for reading” (Escarpit 1991, p. 62)19. It should be noted, however, that the question indicated by the word “trace” only becomes a clear problematic by linking two more defined empirical phenomena, the material process of inscription and the interpretative process of the index. In this sense, making inscriptions of the traces of culture consists of constructing them as indices of practices. This construction is necessarily indirect – and, therefore, problematic – because it involves interpretation, the a posteriori attribution of informational value. To be even more precise, the trace is the concrete representation of this link between the materiality of the inscription and its value as an indication of a practice. The idea of trace, in other words, is a concrete way of representing the problem enacted by the historian. The term “practice”, therefore, appears logically in this context, since it refers, in the broadest sense, to that of which the inscription is the index. This is the most general and frequent term in Chartier’s texts: it is explained by the fact that this term is richer and more open than others that could be substituted, such as “activity”, “behavior” or “habit”. In Bourdieu’s tradition20, use of the term “practice” makes it possible to designate a set of concrete actions without detaching them from a whole universe of representations, beliefs and values. The preference given to this term – 19 This analysis is based on the history of the concept of the document proposed by Fraysse in Gardies (2011, pp. 46–73). 20 For example, the Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (Bourdieu 2000), first published in 1972.

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The Trace Factory

which I share in my own work21 – is linked to the desire not to describe cultural acts independently of a global environment whose content is at once intellectual, ethical and political. The notion of practice, therefore, dominates the analysis; despite everything, it is not self-sufficient, but is part of a system along with use, which makes it possible to situate reading gestures within a more or less strict relationship with the “order of books” (Chartier 1992), i.e. to the materiality of forms and to all the institutions and norms that frame it. The term “use” indicates, in line with cultural history, that which cultural practitioners must “deal with” (Certeau 1990, p. 52), such as devices, discourses and norms. Use is, therefore, a cultural practice that must adapt to the social and practical constraints of a mediatized world, but that also knows how to mark its own initiative and creativity – which is also expressed in the term “appropriation”. 1.2.3. Structural difficulties In the use of the word “trace” by historians it takes on meaning not through a single category but through a set of categories: inscription, index, form, practice and use. These will serve later (Chapter 2) as a basis for the analysis of the contemporary schema of the trace of use. To fully understand what is learned from this research on reading, it is interesting to identify the difficulties that historians face in interpreting “indirect” media cues. To do this, it is enough to take up what they say about it without claiming to escape it ourselves. First of all, we must measure the scope that is formulated here. If inscriptions are instituted as traces, it is because they are considered as witnesses to something that is not directly accessible to us. This, more simply, consists of making them objects of representation. As we have seen above, with regard to the statue of St. Peter, the media texts perform a representational function, by virtue of their power to make something exist that is past or inaccessible, in this case, with regard to the ordinary reading practices of the past, both at once. The trace of use thus allows an “effect and power of presence instead of absence and death” (Marin 1981, p. 10). However, treating the form of the media as a substitute for practices that have become inaccessible to us is problematic for three major reasons. The first is the constraints that inevitably result from a real consideration of mediation and mediatization. Historians of reading do not attempt to make the book a mere medium. They impose on themselves the discipline of thinking the dialectic between what the system proposes and the mode of appropriation to which it is subject. This is the reason why, like Certeau from whom they draw inspiration, they affirm the importance of the space of play between the editorial frameworks of 21 For a more precise argument for this choice, see Jeanneret (2007).

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19

reading and the inventiveness of practices. However, as a result, inscription is not only an indirect but also an uncertain indicator. It loses a little of its character as a trace. In other words, to hold the inscription as a trace is for the historian more a purpose than a program. Chartier, who seeks to “make Michel de Certeau’s proposals operational”, “reminds us, against all the reductions that cancel the creative force of usage, that reading is never totally constrained and that it cannot be deduced from the texts that it appropriates”. Cannot be deduced. This leads to a kind of aporia, “the founding paradox of any history of reading, which must postulate the freedom of a practice of which it can only grasp, on a massive scale, the determinations” (Chartier 1992, p. 33). This does not mean that the effort to link the media to practices is futile, but it is marked by the uncertainty of interpretation. This index is indirect in a second way. What books offer us is not a mimetic representation of reading practices, but, in Chartier’s own words, an “implicit figure”, which is the projection in the texts of how those who produce them – authors as publishers and multiple actors in the book industry – more or less consciously represent themselves as ideal readers, their expectations and their actual uses. Indexical study on the forms of the text may allow fairly plausible hypotheses about how publishers view their readership. We can go one step further and think that changes in these textual formats may have been influenced by the very evolution of practices. The hypothesis defended by this historical trend is rather that of a dialectic. They observe metamorphoses in the forms of the book from one era to another and from one social milieu to another. They draw from this the idea that we can postulate a double determination (in Bourdieu’s terms a structural/structured relationship) between two processes: on the one hand, the development of book (lexical) cultures and, on the other hand, innovation in text-setting devices. However, such an interaction can only be assumed without being really described in its concrete sources; moreover, establishing such a link does not eliminate the irreducible discontinuity between the reading that is represented (in the editor’s head, in the format of the text) and the reading actually practiced by real people in society. In reality, historians’ analyses circulate between three readership concepts: one mobilized by actors in provision of books and named by Chartier as the “implicit reader”; one concretized by the very forms of the text itself, and named by Umberto Eco (1985) as the “model reader”; and finally, one reflected in the practices of effective reading in a community. To add to this complexity, it should be noted that the implicit reader, the principle of action for producers of print, is not entirely confused with the model reader, the principle of interpretation for the reader within the text, and that in terms of effective reading, collective reading does not correspond either to individual forms of practice. However, this complexity is due to the fact that the trace is mediatized here, which it relates to devices, interactions and signs.

20

The Trace Factory

The third difficulty revealed by these works is that the trace is not only studied by the historian, but also produced and often interpreted by the actors themselves. The study of the collective for the study of literate practices, which paid particular attention to the evolution of the ways in which texts are appropriated, showed the richness and diversity of the activity of producing traces among readers themselves. Readers may produce traces for themselves or others and, in this case, what is referred to as the trace is an inscription that works less as an index than what has been “traced-out” (or a tracé in the original concept in French) – a term that will play an important role in the rest of our analysis (see section 3.2). The practice of reading can be approached as a means of tracing one’s own path in the text, breaking it up or reorganizing it according to a path. This metaphor expresses the will to give material thickness to the act of reading: “The open path and the trail markers left along the way, whether it be deliberate or unknown, can guide other readers or serve as signs of recognition for the walker wishing to find their own traces. Some traces are discreet and evanescent, others may permanently affect the ecology of the text, modify the system or even subvert it” (Jacob 2002, p. 17). Even more fundamentally, this image embodies the idea that “reading is rewriting, by inscribing in the text itself new conditions of its intelligibility” (Jacob 2002, p. 128). In ICS-specific terms, what is highlighted, here, is the mediation function of writing and rewriting. It means that inscription cannot simply be approached as an index of a practice that is external to it. When it is mobilized by human beings in society, and not simply by an automaton, it is also a trace intended to be read, i.e. a piece of writing22. If it is always possible to look at a text as an indication of what it reveals, this does not completely erase its dimension as a gesture addressed to others. This consideration, already fundamental in antiquity, has acquired a major significance in the context of industrial media. Indeed, in the cultural and technological universe studied by historians of ancient literary practices, the medium of the written word (papyrus, parchment, paper) defines the spaces and limits of annotation, for example that borne by handwriting in the margins of the printed word. However, current media devices integrate this process and this trace much more intimately into their textual material, which should lead us to pay greater attention to the fact that traces can be indexes, and also mediations of use. All these difficulties point to a more general reality, the communicative nature of what are called traces of use in the media: the fact that what both of them describe as traces are signs that circulate in society via devices of communication.

22 These issues are discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.

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21

1.3. Relevance and efficiency To conclude this journey devoted to the construction of a research object, I would like to quickly situate the specific aim of this book within the many studies of the trace that have developed over the past two decades in an interdisciplinary perspective and in particular within ICS. I will of course have to enter into a dialogue with these works throughout the book, since also, as I pointed out in the introduction, this exchange has been alive for a long time, particularly within the framework of the “l’homme trace”/“Human Trace” collection, a theoretical and empirical dialogue without which this book would not have seen the light of day. I will confine myself, here, first of all, to specifying the particular aim of the approach which I advocate within this constellation of research. Of course, if I consider, here, the communicative forms of the trace – and not only the semiotic category of the index – it is because my reflection is nourished by all the exchanges linked to the Human Trace collection, in its general scope. It is, therefore, necessary to link these particular objects to a more general regime of traces and traceability. I will summarize these givens by means of three shared theoretical options, to which I will have to return in detail: the trace does not naturally exist as a given, but it must be constructed as such and it updates a particular form of thought; therefore, it cannot be opposed, as has often been intended, to the sign, because the trace only exists when it is interpreted and, therefore, constitutes a sign, certainly a particular and complex one but linked to a defined interpretative regime, the “sign-trace” (Galinon-Mélénec 2011, pp. 191–209); as such, the trace is a political and scientific object, because it plays a decisive role in the construction of the information and knowledge that regulate our relationship to the world (LeleuMerviel 2017). Nevertheless, I do not seek to deal with this general problem here. As I said earlier, I am considering, here, a particular type of trace, traces of social practices (and not natural phenomena) that are borne by the media (and not in the natural environment or on the body). These objects are of interest to me because they circulate widely and condition the circulation of ideas and knowledge in society. In other words, it is a problem related to the “trivial life” (Jeanneret 2008a) of the trace that concerns me. As such, the dissemination of objects and their role as intermediaries in the circulation of social conceptions will be the criteria for choosing the empirical examples that I will analyze. What characterizes the research conducted here is also the point of view adopted. It is based on the importance of the question of relevance in the analysis of traces and devices of traceability, but it seeks above all to understand the efficiency of these devices, the power that they manage to exercise.

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The Trace Factory

1.3.1. The evasive relevance of the trace To clarify this approach, it is useful to situate it in relation to that proposed by Leleu-Merviel in her book Informational Tracking (2018). The trace is approached in an epistemological and critical approach aimed at making explicit the construction of devices of information processing. It contributes more broadly to the identification of a new theoretical framework, breaking with the first theories of information, which, to simplify, have two major shortcomings: on the one hand, the fact that they were based on eliminating the production of meaning, and on the other hand, the fact that information is seen as an object while it is a relational process. Leleu-Merviel separates the trace from its apparent naturalness to show its procedural, complex and largely uncertain character. A trace appears as one of the moments of a very elaborate intellectual construct, which assumes prior states (apprehension, data, aggregate, for example), based on material conditions (indexical retention), a technological process (inscription) and above all a work of qualification which gives a basis to its interpretation and guarantees its reliability. The trace is not isolated but is based, in Leleu-Merviel’s words, on a double aggregate of data, that which establishes the informational value of the trace and that which authenticates it. What justifies this methodical construction is the fact, which is immediately apparent, that the current omnipresence of the terms information and trace is accompanied by a lack of definition and, above all, an insufficient examination of the conditions for their relevance in use. As we have seen above, my observations in this respect are similar to those of Leleu-Merviel. This effort has been made necessary by the uncontrolled transfer of technological theories of telecommunications to human activities, which has led to decades of confusion in information theories, so that deconstructive work, carried out very methodically in the first chapters of Informational Tracking, is necessary to subsequently reconstruct the process mentioned above. Therefore, the notion of the horizon of relevance affords a structure for a critique of the uses of the notion of trace. Nothing is a trace in absolute terms, the interpretation of marks is based above all on a domain and a questioning that can justify their meaning. As such, Leleu-Merviel’s analysis is controversial, in the sense given to this term by Bachelard’s epistemology: it is a question of undoing the confusion upon which the use of the word trace is usually based. The work therefore involves the identification of, and separation from, a trivial and illusory epistemology based on a set of conceptual “optical illusions”, mainly the belief in a direct and objective apprehension of the world (Leleu-Merviel 2017, pp. 93–104). The challenge of this critical work is to contribute to a controlled use of the category, and thus of methods of information processing. This clearly formulated objective at the end of the journey is briefly summarized here. In the contemporary digital world, where

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“systems only contain clusters of brand-data without horizons of relevance”, it becomes urgent to “create the necessary consensus with the appropriate methodological rigor […]. In the age of Big Data and deep learning, the current challenge is to help the emergence of consensual interpretative frameworks with the necessary analytical and methodological rigor” (Leleu-Merviel 2018, pp. 235–236). This critical model – which participates in the collective theoretical dialogue over time – will provide an essential framework for the following analyses. However, we will not go into more detail on the criteria for proper use of the trace. If epistemological discussion seemed necessary to Leleu-Merviel, as a device designer and information theorist, it is because the idea that the trace could be a direct and objective grasp of the (social) world is doing very well, it circulates widely, and especially because many devices are built based on this hypothesis. This is what this book is seeking to understand. Leleu-Merviel evokes this “trivial” conception of the trace by commenting on research devoted to the analysis of media audience calculation systems. The critical examination of these mechanisms clearly highlights the fact that they are not guided by a concern to define a horizon of relevance: “[…] the quantitative measurement of audiences is everywhere, a very efficient operator for the media, for their internal and external organization; to do so, it aggregates phenomena that are not comparable. Watching TV or listening to the radio refers to practices, to investment levels, to behavior whose heterogeneity each of us has experienced” (Meadel 2010, quoted by Leleu-Merviel 2018, p. 200). The process is nevertheless efficient, as the quoted text underlines at the outset, since this way of creating traces, however questionable it may be on a scientific level, has considerable power in the political economy of the media, and, therefore, in the sorting of the representations of the world that are disseminated to us. 1.3.2. An efficient figure of relevance Many of the situations that we are confronted by the media today are related to the use of the trivial trace, epistemologically uncontrolled but socially efficient and widespread. Let us take three small real-life examples. I exchange e-mails with a friend who is preparing for the Geneva Conservatory competition and our messages do not avoid mentioning the name of this city: shortly afterwards, during an information search, I see a series of proposals for shows and accommodation in the Swiss capital. I am preparing a course in tourism semiology and to do this, I visit a large number of sites of guides and tour operators dedicated to the city of Rome

24

The Trace Factory

(basic corpus building technique): afterwards, connecting myself to a social network, I see a message appearing to invite me to go through the most powerful intermediary to book plane tickets, a rental car and a hotel there. Colloquia sometimes lead researchers to cite individual works, sometimes collective works designated by the sole name of their coordinators: I read in a book devoted to power relations in science based on the frequency of citations that the presence of my name proves an act of domination, whereas, upon verification, the majority of authors cite, not my texts, but articles written by others in these collective volumes where my name appears. To deduce from a visit to a site dedicated to Rome or from a correspondence with a person who goes to Geneva, or a plan to travel to Geneva as a tourist involves, in Leleu-Merviel’s words, a very uncertain interpretative aggregate, linked to the fact that no aggregate of authentication forms the basis of the evoked practical scenario. Evaluating the intellectual authority of an author or document based solely on the calculation of the occurrences of their name is based on “the ejection of semantics from the system” (Leleu-Merviel 2018, p. 33), leading to confusion between the calculation of signal frequency and information value. Nevertheless, these mechanisms are multiplying and a relative social consensus can be organized around the reliability of these calculations, as is the case with political surveys (Jeanneret and Souchier 1997), which are subject to the same confusion. To be more precise, there are devices whose horizon of relevance is not an example of epistemological rigor. The recommendation engine is wrong when it attributes to me the willingness to visit Geneva when I ask for information about a friend, or when it identifies a plan for a stay in Rome when I am preparing a semiology course. However, in a significant number of cases, the recurrent presence of a city in messages indicates the intention to go there; and above all, there are many more who plan to visit Rome than those who teach semiology. By this logic, it does not matter how misinterpreted a conduct is if the overall efficiency of the system provides opportunities for commercial gain. Similarly, it is unlikely that those who defend the evaluation of researchers on the basis of citations or that of universities by the so-called Shanghai ranking believe in the validity of these calculations to define a scientific advance or the quality of education; however, if their objective is not intellectual but managerial or political, it works; as a result, the reality of these calculations is becoming widespread. What these examples show is that the sharing of belief and the creation of devices can powerfully spread certain qualified media products such as traces into society in material terms and certain conceptions of what a trace is in imaginary terms, without having given rise to critical evaluation. Trivial relevance is therefore constructed by the circulation of objects and by the fact that, little by little, devices diffuse traces which are then seized by actors. A survey conducted by colleagues among students at the beginning of their university education on their use of Google (Simonnot and Gallezot 2009) shows this very clearly. The efficiency of the search

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engine gradually imposes confusion between different possible definitions of relevance, to the point of making it very difficult to teach documentary methods. Indeed, the main argument used to avoid these classic distinctions for documentary techniques (relevance to a situation, a subject, a use, a user, etc.) is that “it works”. The challenge of considering the quantitative processing of code transactions as an indicator of the relevance of documents is de facto successful, conveying with it an absolute and general definition of relevance. Calculating occurrences with an algorithm would ensure the relevance of any search. The categories related, in Leleu-Merviel’s terms, to the value of information are, therefore, in fact, overwhelmed by the efficiency of the calculation. For example, the calculation of a person’s or text’s popularity is equated with its authority value23. 1.3.3. Trace as an interpretative schema The purpose of the research summarized here therefore to understand the effective mode of the trivial existence of the trace, as it circulates in media forms and social representations, including and even more importantly when what is defined as trace does not deserve to be so defined in the critical problematic of Leleu-Merviel. In her effort to justify the importance of the step of qualifying the trace, she writes: “so-called traces may not always be such a thing” (Leleu-Merviel 2018, p. 183). By this Leleu-Merviel means that the power indexical reasoning gives to testify to or to prove this or that reality is not valid. I could say that I am particularly interested in these traces that are not traces. This is because we are literally surrounded by the mass of so-called traces – or at least inscriptions that are not indicative of what they claim to reveal. However, taking this trivial construction of relevance and efficiency seriously necessarily produces an inversion of the approach in relation to the project of methodically grounding a legitimate use of the concept of trace. In a rigorous work of constructing the conditions for the scientific interpretation of indices, the trace is not a given, it is the result of a complex elaboration. The “deployment of the trace” starts with observations captured by perception and leads to the writing of their status as an index, passing through a set of controlled constructs: trace-capture, data, retention, inscription, study and qualification. Each step involves reflective work to explain operations of thought and writing. In social life, on the contrary, it is common to declare an object as the trace of something based on its manifestation, on how it presents itself to us, without necessarily questioning all the aggregates that legitimize it in fact. It can even be said that in the media, for a semiotic production (a map, a curve, a data visualization) to acquire the status of a trace, it is necessary 23 This analysis is provisional, since we will see later (in particular section 4.2.3) that the semiotic dimension of interpretation does not completely disappear behind the calculations.

26

The Trace Factory

that we do not question too much the way it was produced. This holds, for example, for the fact that a news photograph attests to an event, that the search engine’s response list displays accessible information, that a survey curve expresses opinion, and that a line graph identifies a community – all examples that will concern us later. In the trivial life of ordinary and technically produced traces, the trace is inseparable from the context that delivers it and from the more or less implicit interpretative aggregates that accompany it. So much so that, to simplify the idea, a trace in the media is first of all an object that has the material, formal and semiotic means to manifest itself as such. What, for example, is the efficiency of a political survey? It is the claim to account for by mathematical calculation, a certain state of opinion. Thus, in May 1995, polling firms were accused of “failing” because they had announced Édouard Balladur’s victory in the French presidential election. Certainly, in Leleu-Merviel’s words, this so-called trace is not one, because it is based on the confusion between extrapolating the actual votes on election night and collecting voting intentions a few months earlier. The trial of the pollsters expresses this confusion. What does the statement the pollsters were wrong mean? It is based on the assumption that a survey must accurately represent opinion; moreover, the defense of the institutes reproduces and reinforces the same confusion: “it is, they say, only a snapshot of opinion at a given moment in time”24. With this example, we are faced with a certain trivial regime of the trace, with its forms of expression, its “epistemological beliefs” and its “optical illusion” (LeleuMerviel 2018, p. 101) and with the particular play it introduces between relevance and efficiency. However, this regime is defined not only by a word or a device, by a media message or by a belief, but also by all of this. It circulates between devices (the questionnaire), forms of expression (the curve), aggregates of objects (the opinion barometer), discourse regimes (foresight), interpretative principles (the volatility of the electorate) and communication spaces (political broadcasts). What we have called an “interrhetoric” (Jeanneret and Souchier 1997, pp. 153–154). The layout of the multiple configurations of signs that embody the trace thus crosses social spaces in the game of chains of interpretations, that which I call “triviality”. Therefore, I have chosen to define the mediatized trace as an interpretative schema and not as a concept. We introduced the term “schema” with Émilie Flon as part of research we conducted together on the modes of presence of places and their practice on the Web (Flon and Jeanneret, in Davallon 2012, pp. 99–104; Flon and Jeanneret 2010). The aim was to analyze mediations of the 24 The meaning of this argument as an example of the trace schema is analyzed in detail in section 2.3.1.

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representation of relationships between tourism practices and places in the computerized media. I had the opportunity to take up the concept of an organizational schema in the context of an analysis of so-called “cartographic” representations of the social world (Jeanneret in Galinon-Mélénec and Zlitni 2013, pp. 235–267). Jean-Édouard Bigot (2018) mobilized this concept in his critical research on devices produced by technologists in their claim to replace the social sciences and humanities with “metrics” (a claim that will be discussed in section 4.2.3). On this occasion, he explained the epistemological status of the category (Bigot 2018, pp. 237–240), attributing to it a role of articulation between the phenomenological posture of the analyst and the concrete forms by which it is actualized: what can be called, following Marin (1994), “figurations”25. For Bigot, the notion of a schema makes it possible to understand how this type of media object “organizes a particular regime of visuality that is at the same time an ‘intellectuality’ and to describe [their] particular ways of organizing, structuring and informing the realities they ‘deal with’” (Bigot 2018, pp. 237–238). The result of this analysis is to highlight and make debatable the “claims of mediation” of calculation-based methods of social knowledge, claims that they most often naturalize. In the study of tourism sites, indeed, as in Bigot’s research, the expression “organizing schema” refers to a structure that is sufficiently prominent, and also sufficiently flexible to be able to take a certain number of organizational forms while embodying within info-communication devices an analogous view of the world. The choice of terminology for the expression “interpretative schema” here meets the same objective of identifying “a structural construction that ensures a link between the technological, semiotic and phenomenological dimensions of representation and for this reason defines certain determining conditions for the construction of the meaning of information within a device” (Flon and Jeanneret 2010, p. 4). In this case, it was then a question, within the organizing schema, of a certain way of articulating, in various graphic configurations, a relationship between the space of writing and the space of the places of practice. The organizational schema was, we wrote, “both a process and a meaning, in fact a creation of meaning in the narrow sense. The schema is, therefore, dynamic” (Flon and Jeanneret 2010, p. 4). It is the search for such relationships that will serve, starting from the next chapter, as a basis of our investigation into the lives of traces and how they are translated into ideas, gestures and tools. The comment we added applies to the trace schema. “The schema is not reduced to a semiotic modality (as piece of writing), nor to a form (as a list), nor to a cognitive procedure (as a classification) but integrates these different levels into a singular construction” (Jeanneret and Flon 2010, p. 4). In the following chapter, we will see the trace using different semiotic substances (writing as figures), mobilizing 25 On the use of the concept of figuration in ICS, see Jeanneret (2014a, pp. 71–78).

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The Trace Factory

different forms (a graph as photography), engaging complex cognitive and normative operations (observation and belief) and mobilizing the properties of different media in particularly numerous and creative configurations. The trace schema is, therefore, not a simple form of expression. It has great formal plasticity and can be actualized in a very diversified range of different figurations, which our investigation will have to explore. All the uses of the term “schema” are related to the role that the schematism plays in Kant’s philosophy of personal knowledge, that of a dynamic and flexible structure mediating between sensibility and understanding. In the article cited (Flon and Jeanneret 2010), we discuss the choice of this term by comparing it with other authors and their theoretical framework, in particular the use of the same expression in a different sense by Marin (1994) and the concept of pattern in Leleu-Merviel and Useille (2008). In communicational terms, the concept of schema is similar to that of composite (Le Marec 2002) and is derived from it, because it is also a structure that associates, in a flexible way, devices, knowledge, texts and situations. However, where the composite derives its main value is that is allows the study of the singularity of a situation and a situated and singular practice, the schema aims to identify circulating features in such a way that it establishes a relationship to social reality. It cannot be reduced to a category of thought or a product, but as a process, it has a structural character that we will seek to understand. The interpretative schema obeys the same principles as the organizing schema, but targets a somewhat different object, because it finds its main relevance in writing, and that in turn within reading and the production of knowledge. The concept of an interpretative schema bears some relation to Jean-Michel Berthelot’s (1990) “intelligibility schemas”. This proximity is because, in either case, the main issue of the analysis is the paths of “social intelligence”, to use its picturesque expression, and because, in any case, we must accept the reason that it is always marked by uncertainty. Hence, the definition of this concept given by the social science epistemologist (“a matrix of operations making it possible to inscribe a set of facts in a system of intelligibility, i.e. to reason or provide an explanation”) applies to the trace of the schema. However, there are two differences with the trace of the schema used here. On the one hand, once intelligibility schemas are formalized they define, for Berthelot, well-defined systems of acceptability of a theory in anthroposocial sciences, the trace of the schema taking multiple and unequally controlled forms, and concerning more or less well-defined, more or less valid trivial modes of existence of the social knowledge project in the name of the idea of trace. On the other hand, where Berthelot seeks to isolate the cognitive part of the work of social intelligence, the schema of the trace draws its strength from the historical construction of strong relationships between signs, objects, practices and representations.

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Finally, the interpretative schema is not unrelated to the cognitive schema as it is mobilized in Jean Piaget’s genetic epistemology. It has the same character as a flexible structure that is repeated in similar circumstances and, therefore, has a repeatable and transferable character in different circumstances. However, where this usage has as its main purpose the genesis of individual capacities, these are categories that circulate in the social sphere and inform the construction of devices. We will, therefore, seek to describe in the chapter that follows the trace as a trivial interpretative schema that presides over the contemporary multiplication of efficient devices for the production of mediatized representations of the social world. This initial work is necessary to then explore the multiple configurations of the trace in the media.

2 The Schema of the Trace, a Paradoxical Semiotics

To be clear from the outset, the trace will be considered, here, as a sign. However, this definition is not at all universally shared. It is quite disturbing to see how the trace gives rise to different positions. This can be seen by observing the way in which scientific publications construct this object. I studied the frequency of a few terms in French in two collective publications, the issue of the journal Hermès devoted to the theme of “Traceability and Networks” (Merzeau and Arnaud 2009) and the collective volume L’hommetrace (Galinon-Mélénec 2011). This comparison shows to what extent the trace object spreads according to the logic of thought that make use of it. This will put us on the path of the paradox with which it confronts us. Table 2.1, below, shows the frequency of a set of terms in each of the two corpora. The chosen terms are of two types: on the one hand, a series of categories that play a major role in the theoretical texts discussed so far, and on the other hand, some terms whose particular frequency in the corpus appears clearly upon reading1. This work does not claim to be representative, because the list has been compiled intuitively on the basis of the review of historical literature presented in section 1.2 and the exhaustive reading of the two corpora, and it does not obey any systematic principle; these partial results, here, have no other claim than to show that construction of the notion is done in different and even largely incompatible ways, because each of the collectives marks a preference for certain categories and in contrast neglects others. The diversity of the authors united around this theme nevertheless gives a certain relevance to this study. 1 All terms in the titles of articles and chapters have been tested, but those whose frequency is not verified in the corpus have not been included in the table.

The Trace Factory, First Edition. Yves Jeanneret. © ISTE Ltd 2020. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Terms

Number of occurrences in the Hermés publications

Number of author occurrences in L’homme-trace

Donnée (Data)

434

39

Numérique (Digital)

140

19

Identité (Identity)

86

45

Usage

71

94

Pratique (Practical)

49

77

Signe (Sign)

20

450

Sens (Meaning)

13

115

Interprétation/Interpréter (Interpretation/Interpreting)

11

58

Inscription/Inscrire (Inscription/Inscribe)

10

98

Écrit/Écriture (Written/Writing)

8

81

Indice/Indiciel/Indiciaire (Index/Indexed/Indices)

3

112

Présence (Presence)

20

64

Représentation/Représenter (Representation/Represent)

21

57

Table 2.1. Frequency of use of some French 2 terms in two collective volumes on the trace

We may be surprised by the limited presence in the Hermès collective journal of concepts that play a major role in the reflections of historians of reading as well as in the epistemological analysis of the trace conducted in Leleu-Merviel (2017). These include, for example, the notions of inscription (cited 10 times in all and absent from

2 The numbers indicate the number of occurrences of words in their full use as notions (expressions such as “il est pratique de” (it is practical to…) or “comme l’écrit untel” (as written by so-and-so”) have not been counted). The terms are lemmatized, the verb in its different inflections, the noun and the adjective being assimilated.

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2/3 of the texts), evidence (almost absent with three occurrences from a single author), interpretation (used only 11 times by five authors) and meaning (mentioned 13 times and absent from 3/4 of the texts). In comparison, the same categories play a major role in the volume L’homme-trace, where meaning is mentioned 115 times, index 112 times, inscription 98 times and interpretation 58 times. For the credited authors of the issue of Hermès, the trace particularly evokes the concepts of data (454 occurrences), the digital (140 occurrences) and above all functions as a kind of avatar of identity (87 occurrences)3. In a more synthetic way, we can say that for the authors of L’homme-trace, the question of the trace leads to a semiotic reflection, because it is a sign to be interpreted, whereas for those of the journal Hermès the trace is a reality experienced as a datum related to the technological substrate and the question that arises is what can be done with it. This is probably why the major concepts of historical analysis and epistemological reflection (inscription, index, practice, interpretation) are very important in one case, and much less so in the other case. This very strong contrast is apparent if we give a visual representation of these two constellations of categories (Figures 2.1 and 2.2).

Figure 2.1. Weighting of some terms in the journal Hermès, no. 584

3 I must mention the particular case of the term “document”, which is quite common in Hermès’ corpus (80 occurrences), but which is used by only one-third of the authors, two of whom are responsible for almost all of the occurrences (58 and 17 respectively). These data may be affected by the fact that the title of the Hermès issue includes the word “networks”, which may have indicated the digital for authors. 4 The font size varies with the frequency of occurrence of the terms, but the variation has been significantly reduced because a readable representation of the actual values is not possible within the same visual range.

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Figure 2.2. Weighting of some terms in the volume L’homme-trace (CNRS editions)

In the corpus of the journal Hermès, the absence of the words sign, writing, index and interpretation goes hand in hand with the fact that the words trace and traceability are used to designate various empirical objects but do not give rise to definition or discussion. Reading the articles in this issue, we may consider that the trace evokes, on the one hand, computerized data and, on the other hand, a digital duplicate of the person. On the contrary, the low use of semiotic categories (sign, index, interpretation) is explicitly justified in two articles of the collection, Louise Merzeau’s article entitled “Du signe à la trace, l’information sur mesure”, which affirms the need to move from the paradigm of the sign to that of the trace and Olivier Ertzsheid’s article entitled “L’homme, un document comme les autres” which does not consider as relevant the difference between the person and their representation by a media inscription. In any case, the question of the meaning that can be given to the trace, which occupies the authors in L’homme-trace, does not seem to arise for those of Traceability and Networks. This is not the place to discuss these arguments of the substitution of the trace for the sign or the transformation of the human being into a document, which we will find after having more clearly conceptualized the leitmotiv of the trace. We will retain from this initial exploration of lexical dispersion within a corpus taken as an example that the trace is an object in tension: a sign whose semiotic nature and interpretation are particularly complex, but which can make the question of its interpretation disappear behind its obviousness. A sign that can claim to be a non-sign. It is an important component of the trace schema. Nevertheless, to understand this paradox, it is first necessary to understand how the trace can be interpreted and even created as a trace, and for this purpose to seriously study what is called, in semiotics, an index. It is from this that we can work to understand what particular type of index the trace is.

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2.1. The false evidence of the Peircian index Returning to the texts that Charles S. Peirce devoted to the concept of the index5 can help us understand what we do when we interpret a trace. Indeed, a century ago, Peirce tried to understand the processes of meaning and the use we make of signs, without limiting himself to language or making language the model for all signs. In addition, he above all sought to understand what kind of knowledge we construct when we use signs: this is all the more so, since for him thinking and manipulating signs are synonymous. It is in this context that he created the category of the index, with tradition retaining the term after him, to understand how certain signs can testify to a reality. We have seen above historians such as Chartier who linked the terms index and trace; Leleu-Merviel, the information theorist, more precisely defined the material dimension of trace in these terms: “indexical retention of marks inscribed on a medium” (Leleu-Merviel 2017, p. 159). It is also upon the indexical nature of objects as representatives of a world of origin that the process of patrimonialization described by Davallon (2006) is based. We will have to deepen the meaning of this definition with regard to the particular object of interest to us, mediatized traces; but in the immediate future, it seems wise to return to Peirce’s definition of the index to understand the problem he had in mind in creating this term. With this approach, we do not intend to produce an exegesis of the Peircian theory of the sign; it is only a matter of identifying the questions raised by the theory of the index. This is an obligatory point of passage to then lead to a semiotic analysis of the trace as such, which implies a very particular type of indexical reasoning. Indeed, it is not necessary to subscribe to the Peircian theory to have a conception of the index and a fortiori of the trace; however, without identifying the problems posed by this concept, we risk being seriously mistaken about what a trace is. 2.1.1. The concept of index and semiotic theory However, we are immediately confronted with an initial difficulty. The term index is extremely common today in the most diverse discourses, to the point of seeming self-evident; however, when reading Peirce’s texts, the theoretical question reveals itself to be very tricky. This creates a paradox that makes the index seem obvious but to not be so at all, which is at the heart of the problem we are studying. In any case, it is at the root of the questions raised by the trace. 5 Peirce wrote “index” in English. We will see later that the terms “index” in English and “indice” in French are not equivalent and that their translation from one language to another has theoretical consequences.

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The meaning Peirce gives to the index – which in his theory is a highly developed concept – does not correspond to the ordinary meaning given to this notion by most introductions to theories of signs. It can even be said that this concept is the subject of a rather general misinterpretation in textbooks on the media and communication. This is because the term is removed from the conceptual background that gives it meaning. If I stop here, it is because this simplification not only betrays the texts – which in itself is not a problem – but also leads to an erroneous approach to the trace. As I am not in a position to propose, here, an in-depth commentary on Peirce, I will rely on a careful but partial reading of his texts6 and on comments concerning him by several specialists to identify the issues at stake in these confusions and prepare a more structured approach to indexical reasoning – because it is the reasoning that is at stake here (see, in particular, Deledalle in Peirce 1978; Babou 1999, pp. 31–88; Tiercelin 1993; Sebeok 2001; Basso-Fossali in Basso-Fossali and Dondero 2011, pp. 141–291). In reality, the category of the index is not separable in Peirce from the more general approach that he takes to the sign, meaning and, even, thought. For Peirce, meaning is above all a process: for him, no sign is a sign by nature; it becomes one through the thought process that gives it meaning. It can be said, therefore, that the Peircian theory is constructivist. Hence, the central concept of Peircian semiotics is not the sign, but the process of producing meaning, which he calls by the Greek term semeiosis or semiosis. The index is the product of a certain construction of signs: a particular form of semiosis. However, the fact of considering meaning as a process and the sign as its product calls into question the dominant way in which we have thought of the sign since classical times. In a definition such as that of the so-called Port-Royal Logic, which has long been a reference and even served as the basis for structural linguistics, a sign is an object that represents another. “Thus, it states, the sign contains two ideas: one of the thing that represents; the other of the thing represented; and its nature is to evoke the second by means of the first” (Arnauld and Nicole 1970, p. 80)7. The classical sign is a two-sided object: its manifestation on one side, the thought it carries on the other side, or more simply, its body and soul. Saussure, founder of general linguistics, radicalized this thesis by posing a structural relationship between the two terms: for him, one cannot separate the two sides of the sign any more than those of a leaf or a coin.

6 I rely on the collection published by Gérard Deledalle (Peirce 1978) and on several passages from the Collected Papers that I have identified in the work of the theorists mentioned. 7 The ampersand initially present in the cited work has been replaced by “and”.

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If we take this theory of the sign literally8, there is hardly any room for the genesis of meaning. Interpretation is reduced to a narrow scope: it consists of implementing the correspondence contained in the definition of the sign. Therefore, Peirce, who intends to organize all human thought around the production of meaning (semiosis), switches to a system that does not postulate a direct correspondence between the sign and what it represents. For Peirce, the sign is really produced by the mind of the person who interprets it. This change in point of view, consisting of moving from a code to a construction of meaning, requires the abandonment of the binary system of classical representation in favor of a ternary conception of the sign: to move from the material sign to the object it designates, a third term is needed, which is the principle of interpretation that allows the sign to be given meaning. Musicians know this: for it to swing, you need a ternary rhythm. This ternary thinking is what justifies the use of categories such as the index and, for other interpretive processes, the icon and symbol: categories that are too often addressed without reference to this ternary theoretical model. Indeed, these three categories are only one aspect of a theory entirely thought out in a ternary way, or, what is equivalent, in terms of process. Any complete interpretation of a sign goes through three moments, which Peirce names respectively: 1) the representamen (the perceived thing); 2) the object; 3) the interpretant. The production of meaning, or semiosis, therefore goes through three stages, to simplify: a perceived material form (e.g. smoke), an object that this form designates (the presence of fire), but which designates it only because an idea makes it possible to interpret it (e.g. there is no smoke without fire). It is precisely because he gives a major place to the activity of producing meaning that Peirce sets up a ternary system – in current translations a trichotomy, I would say, here, a triad to simplify – what we perceive, the meaning we give it, the way to produce meaning. The notion of index is to be understood, like all the Peircian concepts, within this global movement. Thus, the wheel of interpretation does not stop turning: indeed, as soon as I have reached an object, I can consider that object in turn as a sign and apply an interpretant to it. For example, I may wonder what the presence of a fire indicates and think that it is a sign of human presence. However, it must be understood that as soon as we talk about traces, even digital traces or numerical data understood as traces, this wheel of interpretation is turning, sometimes hidden to be sure, but it is turning somewhere.

8 Of course, the Port-Royal theory is not so naive and provides more complex figures of meaning (Marin 1975).

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The two examples I have just given, first smoke as a sign of fire, then fire as a sign of human presence, are indices. The following terms are generally used where these are signs that indicate a real phenomenon: the fire causes smoke, which could have been started by a human being. For the moment, let us be satisfied with this definition, which will have to be refined. However, of course, Peirce’s thinking can also be illustrated with an example that does not concern indices and does not concern a physical but an intellectual object. For example, if we avoid using a lane marked by a red circle crossed by a white line (perceived shape), it is because we know that it is prohibited (object) under the Rules of the Road (interpretant), which, in this case, is conventional – in Peirce’s terms, it is a symbol9. Why do we insist, here, on this question, which is much more general than that of the index? Precisely because there is a great temptation to define the index without taking into account this framework, which alone gives it its meaning. For example, it is said that the index is a sign that manifests a factual reality. This is somewhat true, but not completely, because otherwise the index would escape the ternary principle of the production of meaning, existing simply as a fact. It would no longer be a sign. However, the category of the index takes on its meaning from this global process of perception and interpretation, which does not escape it. Peirce tries to clarify the possible relationships between the form we perceive (the representamen) and the meaning we give it (the object) and more particularly what justifies the fact that the perceived form (the representamen) can refer to the object it designates. This triad presents general categories of semiotization, mediations of interpretative activity, which, being fundamental conditions of semiosis, are present in the reading of any sign, no matter how factual or immediate it may appear. Denying this suggests a reduction, quite common, of Peircian semiotics to a categorization of the real (Basso-Fossali 2011). The categories therefore depend on what underlies this relationship; they define the point of view, the terrain, the ground that justifies the relationship between perceived form and object. In the case of the index, this foundation is a real relationship: smoke is actually related to fire, and its existence is dependent on that of fire. This leads Peirce to say that the index cannot exist without its purpose. In the case of the icon (e.g. the color red for blood), the basis of the sign is the object, or to be more precise, sharing a perceptible property with the object. In that of the symbol (e.g. the same color red for communism), this foundation is a social convention, a product of human history and culture. To treat a perceived form (a sign in the common sense of the term) as an index is to interpret it as having a real relationship to its object and to consider more precisely that the existence of the sign

9 Of course, these definitions are specific to Peirce. In the patrimonialization theory, it is the recognition of the indexical character of objects that constitutes the major symbolic act, in accordance with Greek tradition, in which breaking an object so that its owners recognize the bond that unites them is to create a symbol.

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(the perceived form) depends on the existence of the object. So, for example, that the imprint of a foot depends on a human being having passed by. It is this indexical reasoning that transforms this imprint, as a perceived form, into a trace. One source of error must be immediately highlighted. The basis of the sign does not guarantee how it will be interpreted. Just because we consider an object as an index does not mean that it is really related to its object; and just because an index is actually related to its object does not mean that we are certain to determine without error the reality it designates. There is no transitivity between the basis of interpretation and the interpretive process. All detective novels are full of false clues (indexes), signs (in the common sense of perceived forms) that are interpreted as clues, but do not reveal real causality. Indeed, interpretation always involves the production of meaning, and this always involves other triads, which are not detailed here. The index is a materially based but enigmatic sign. It is always related to its purpose and often difficult to access. 2.1.2. The index as a commonplace category A superficial understanding of the previous categories, separated from this general theoretical framework, leads to the most common definition of the index as a “type of sign”, as found in many textbooks: the icon resembles its object (e.g. the portrait to the face); the index refers to the real (e.g. smoke and fire), the symbol is a convention (e.g. the symbol x for the unknown in a mathematical equation). However, this definition is not false but insufficient and above all generates errors and illusions. As we have just seen, these categories (icon, index, symbol) are ways of constructing the relationship between the perceived form (the sign in the usual sense of the term) and its object. If we connect a perceived object to an imagined object through a common quality (a color, shape, flavor, etc.), we create an icon; if it is in the name of a factual link, it is an index; if it is in the name of a cultural category, it is a symbol. For this reason, it is preferable to speak of iconic, indexical or symbolic interpretation (semiosis) of signs rather than considering icons, indices and symbols as signs of different natures. No concrete element in itself defines a sign as being, by its nature, an icon, clue or symbol. “It is not true that any cultural entity can be identified with an icon, index or symbol; indeed, each cultural occurrence extensively includes the three members of the trichotomy according to the intrinsic relationships that characterize it” (Basso-Fossali 2011, p. 147). In addition, each concrete object can be involved in an iconic, indexical or symbolic process. This does not mean, of course (we will see this later with photography), that it displays the same material dispositions to do so.

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To repeat the above examples, smoke has been used by some people as a (symbolic) code to convey messages and a meaning about what is prohibited may reveal a new urban planning policy (as being an index). As for the sign indicating a bend in the road, it must be interpreted successively as an icon (of the road layout) and as a symbol (belonging to the Rules of the Road) to indicate a danger. Over the course of the metamorphoses of their interpretation, these objects have not changed their material nature (the perceived form has not changed); they have only been grasped through different semioses, which refer to different foundations of the relationship of meaning. These are thus charged with meaning from different interpretants. We have made this detour, here, because the index is often not sufficiently linked to meaning as a process. The summative explanation in textbooks of only the triad of the object (icon, index, symbol)10 and especially its translation into a theory of “types of signs” tend to freeze the definition of the index and detach it from the process of interpretation. This reification of signs into a typology of objects even goes so far as to function in opposition to the initial theoretical framework, since it tends to erase the essential, which is the relational and procedural dimension of meaning (Babou 1999, pp. 31–88). The point here is not to stigmatize this form of popularization of semiotics, but to distinguish what it allows us to understand about the indexical interpretation of signs from the confusion to which it can lead. As a “trivial” (translated, circulating, instrumentalized) category, the index essentially and correctly serves to combat the reduction of signs to conventional (“arbitrary”) realities, as Saussurian linguistics, or rather its interpretation by structuralism11, may suggest. It avoids seeing all signs through the language model and more broadly the code model, and shows that not everything is conventional and arbitrary; it reminds us that some signs have a real relationship with what they designate. A good illustration of this question is given by Barthes’ progressive development of a theory of photography, which we will explore in section 2.2. After initially considering photographs based on a rhetoric of the image, Barthes formulated the specificity of photography in terms that which unambiguously highlight the indexical link between the photograph and its object by designating “not the optionally real thing to which an image or sign refers, but the necessarily real thing that has been placed in front of the lens, without which there would be no 10 For Peirce, the whole process of communication and meaning is structured in three moments linked to fundamental human activities: perception of qualities (primacy), making links between objects (secondity) and creating cultural entities (terceity). The triad of icon, index and symbol (that which concerns the relation to the object) is therefore only one element of the process. There are two other triads, focusing on the representamen and the interpretant and multiple ways of combining these triads. 11 It should be remembered that Saussure does not claim to analyze all types of signs, but only language and more precisely the language system.

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photography” (Barthes 2002 [1980], p. 851)12. Here, we find the definition of the index as a sign that would not exist if its object did not exist. This is what makes this analysis, not just a simple episode in semiological research, but a major theoretical breakthrough. This is because we do not approach communication in the same way depending on whether or not we think that it be fundamentally a matter of language, or whether we give weight to the real and its technological extensions. As such, the index is the most obvious embodiment of the Peircian contribution13. It is the most obvious example that can be opposed to the thesis of a “semiotic divide” between the world of signs and the real world. The index, adhering to its object, brings meaning linked to causality. It shows that we cannot treat every sign as a variant of a word, and more generally as a code. Peirce’s definitions of the index are complex and multiple. Some of them are in line with this tendency of the sign to be supported by fact: “I define an Index as a sign determined by its dynamic14 object through the real relationship it has with it” (Peirce 1978, p. 32), or even “an Index is a sign that refers to the object it denotes because it is really affected by this object” (Peirce 1978, p. 140). Hence, textbooks favor this type of definition: the index is valid for the object because it is its extension or part of it: it is a kind of metonymy of the real in the signifying world. It could be said that for this everyday theory of communication, the existence of a causal link is the interpretant of any index, and therefore, in Peirce’s terms, that the idea of causality is the ground that justifies any interpretation of a sign as an index of something. It is this definition of the index as a sign taken from the real, and even as the incursion of the real into our lives, that led Daniel Bougnoux to reinterpret the triad of Peirce’s object based on Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical triad: real (index), imaginary (icon) and symbolic (symbol). The sequence of the index, the icon and the symbol would lead us from the drive to fantasy and then to language. For Bougnoux, the index is the first degree of our psychological movements, the most elementary and most instinctive level of our culture, the figure of reality in our existence. He writes, for example: “Segment, imprint, detectable trace [note the term] or minimal presence of the thing itself, the index resides below the semiotic divide, or on the side of the manifestations of things, and it is related to primary functioning in the Freudian classification” (Bougnoux 1995, p. 68). 12 Barthes’ thesis is discussed in detail in section 3.2. 13 Barthes does not mobilize the Peircian theoretical framework, I am the one who makes the link between the works of the two authors. However, we can consider the theory of myth, which explains that any constituted sign can be the starting point of a new sign, as a formulation, in the terms of structural linguistics, of infinite semiosis. 14 The dynamic object is the one to which the interpretation of the sign leads when correctly conducted – which is never guaranteed.

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This argument is interesting to identify some of the issues involved in the quest for traces; but we must be careful because by establishing this equivalence, Bougnoux reverses the order of the Peircian triad, in which the iconic comes first. It is interesting to understand why. Peirce was particularly attentive to the rigor of his constructs, and did not decide at random that the index is not first or immediate. For him, the index has meaning by virtue of the real, but it belongs to the world of signs. Peirce is not an empiricist. He does not think that observing the world is enough to establish scientific facts. For him, the index, which supposes the construction of a relationship between objects (often, but not systematically causal), cannot be first; it is necessarily preceded by what appears (by the phenomenology of the sign) which depends on our perceptive resources. Bougnoux, for his part, is particularly interested in the threats to culture posed by a regression towards the real; for him, the index is the zero degree of symbolization activity, an immersion in reality that threatens symbolism. A warning that makes sense in the face of the cultural and political pretensions of contemporary traceability systems.15 These two points of view cannot be combined, but this does not prevent us from drawing a very important conclusion for the future: indexical reasoning postulates a direct link between the sign and what it designates, it is in a way what distinguishes it from other signs; but it is neither natural nor primary. If the correct interpretation of the indexical sign must reveal a real relationship of correlation, it is not immediate or transparent. 2.1.3. The production of indexicality It is understood at this stage that assigning a label to a sign is both convenient and reductive. As commonplace reformulations progressed, the notion of the sign became a fetish. We come to believe that signs can be put in boxes, and that one of the boxes, the index (and trace) box, contains signs that are not really signs, because they are statements of reality, that they simply attest to the existence of objects and causal relationships between objects. In a way, Peirce’s texts, which multiply taxonomic series, encourage this reading. Peirce constantly brandishes a semiotic sieve, a sorting machine. However, we must be careful because at no time does Peirce individualize signs (by which we mean concrete objects of our experience) since his categorizations concern reasoning: in this case, for the triad of the object, analogy (iconicity), making links (indexing) and culture (symbolism): “Peirce’s suggestive and idiosyncratic terms should not hide the idea that semiotics has its own domain, the Universe of Signs, and that it is

15 See section 4.2.3.

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configured as a science of mediations that finds the irreducibility of Thirdness in itself. Indeed, a sign can only be interpreted by another sign” (Basso-Fossali 2011, p. 155). To move forward, we must therefore definitively get rid of the idea that there are different types of signs and that some, the indices, are by nature “more real” signs than others. Or rather, it is more accurate to say that such an interpretation of indices is not in accordance with the Peircian theory on whose behalf it is most often formulated. However, this typology of signs (real, imaginary, conventional) will induce two types of illusions as to what a trace can be: on the one hand, the belief that there are signs that are more real than others; on the other hand, the underestimation of the complexity of the interpretative processes involved in producing an index. The first error is based on a summary interpretation of the idea of contiguity (of factual relationship) between the sign and its object. It consists of deciding that certain signs give transparent access to real objects and in particular to causal relationships (in nature, in society). It is true that indexical semiosis postulates a real relationship between the perceived form (the sign in the common sense) and what it designates (its object); but this relationship is not necessarily causal and therefore it does not necessarily prove the real existence of a natural or physical phenomenon. Indeed, the object targeted by indexical inference is not necessarily empirical (in Peirce’s terms, it is not necessarily a dictated sign that establishes a correlation between two objects of the world16); the representamen may be conventional in itself, and its referent abstract or imaginary. For Peirce, relative pronouns or algebraic notation (Peirce 1978, pp. 159–160) are indexical because, within a document, within a range of text, they are physically linked. In addition, the relative pronoun could not exist if its antecedent did not exist, nor the unknown without the calculation that requires it. We will see later about the communicative scope of this ambiguity. Let us recall that for Peirce, no sign is sufficiently characterized when its relationship to the object, which is only one component of the semiotic triad, has been qualified. A sign may have various qualities and be interpreted differently: it is the subject of an indexical interpretation when it designates a conjunction between two realities, one directly perceived and the other invisible but postulated by the indexical reasoning.

16 The triad of the object (icon, index and symbol) specifies, as we have seen, the basis of the link between the perceived form and the object; the third triad (triad of the interpretant) concerns what the interpretation shows: a relationship of quality (rhematical sign), a correlation (dictated sign) and a symbolic relationship (argument).

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Let us therefore remember that not all indices express a natural relationship and that the indexical interpretation of a sign (in the common sense) may refer to a real relationship, but within a text (the relative pronoun) or within an abstract statement (a mathematical notation). This will be very important later on. However, it is no less important to understand that, even in the case of the material interpretation of a real link, the production of meaning is no less complex than in the case of a symbolic statement presenting an abstract, poetic or philosophical text. Peirce took the time to point this out precisely by studying a famous example, that of Robinson Crusoe’s discovery of the traces of Friday’s footprints on the island he thought was deserted. When Robinson observes the imprint of a foot on the sand, his final interpretation of the shape (of this sign in the common sense) is indexical. The basis of this interpretation is indeed a real – in this case causal – link between the object perceived in its materiality, the deformation of the structure of the soil, and the object it designates, the passage of a singular and existing human person, which Robinson will name Friday (which is, by the way, the ultimate example of a symbolic act). In Peirce’s terms, this interpretation identifies the dynamic object of the sign, that to which the interpretation must lead in order to be correct. It can therefore be accepted that the identification of the presence of a particular human being does indeed refer to a reality, and, through it, the existence of a real causal link between the passage of this living being and the perceived form. It is because a man has really passed by there that the ground is deformed. If he had not passed by, the print could not have existed as a sign. To interpret this imprint as an indexis to establish a real relationship between the sign and what it designates. For all that, the interpretation is not immediate or transparent. It is not the form itself alone that can deliver it. As Peirce says, the index attracts our attention, but it says nothing in itself: “The index says nothing; it just says: ‘There’. It grabs your eyes and forces them to look at a particular object, so to speak, and that’s it” (Peirce 1978, p. 144). Elsewhere: “Everything that surprises us is an index, insofar as it marks the conjunction between two positions of experience” (Peirce 1978, p. 154). In reality, a whole series of interpretations must be used, based on both a whole culture and a range of successive different interpretants, to arrive at this final interpretation. What Robinson observes, this perceived form, is initially only what Leleu-Merviel calls a “diaphoria”17: a simple physical irregularity that attracts attention. To be put on the path of a human presence, Robinson must then treat this form as an icon, i.e. observe the similarity between this form and that of the foot and thus change the diaphoria into an imprint; but above all he must go through a series

17 Merviel (2017) used this term from Luciano Floridi and gave it a precise status as part of an approach to the informational construction of traces.

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of symbolic interpretants to imagine the passage of a walking man (a narrative account), a human morphology and, in a more abstract way, the idea of humanity. I would like to quote at some length from Claudine Tiercelin’s commentary on Peirce’s text, because the analysis clearly highlights the mediated and complex nature of the interpretation of the apparently most transparent index: “In relation to its object, [the trace of a footstep] is an icon, or imagesign, that refers to its object by virtue of its own characteristics. The trace, here, is iconic because it can represent its object mainly through its similarity […]. But the footprint is also, in relation to its object, an index, that of the presence on the island, not of someone in general, but of the individual Friday18. Note the close link of ‘real connection’ (2,283) which links the sign to its object and makes the latter necessary for the sign: the footprint attracts attention, it surprises those who thought they were on a desert island. It indicates the existential presence of an individual. But the footprint also has the value of a symbol […] for the interpretant, who infers from the representation of this form and what it indicates, the presence of a man on the island” (Tiercelin 1993, pp. 59–60)19. This comment is particularly interesting, in that it shows the complexity of interpreting a sign that nevertheless seems obvious. It draws our attention to the fact that the interpretation of indices will become increasingly difficult as the phenomena depend on more complex knowledge. Catherine Allamel-Raffin, who observed the work of researchers in astrophysics and atomic physics, described, for example, the extreme sophistication of the “inter-instrumentality” devices that physicists develop to really identify physical phenomena. It is this complex work that allows them to hope to distinguish, at the cost of many technical tricks and debates, the indications of observable phenomena from what they call “artifacts”, signs that relate to the functioning of the observation instrument (Allamel-Raffin 2005): a perfect example of situations where indexical reasoning rightly implies the possibility of objectifying phenomena, but encounters the greatest difficulty in validating a truly established causality. It is only the complexity of these mediations of the index that makes it possible to escape the absurd alternative between reducing science to a pure narrative of fiction or confusing physical phenomena and the personal knowledge we can have of them (Jeanneret 1998).

18 More precisely, the individual who will become Friday when he has been named as such (YJ). 19 The figures in parentheses refer to the numbering of Peirce’s fragments in the Collected Papers, which constitutes the benchmark resource for his work. The principal text devoted by Peirce to Robinson Crusoe is fragment 4,531.

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We will have to take up this question, which becomes even more complex, when the purpose of indexical reasoning is not to identify a physical phenomenon but a social practice. 2.1.4. Assessment: a problematic legacy The proposed re-reading, here, of certain aspects of Peircian index theory is based on considering trace as a particular mode of indexical sign interpretation. This partial and simplified commentary was intended to identify some key issues that must be taken into account in order to move towards a more specific examination of the notion of trace. I propose to draw three main conclusions from this theoretical discussion. First, the Peircian index theory makes it possible to better gauge what is at stake in approaching the trace as an index, and therefore in defining the trace as “indexical retention” (Leleu-Merviel 2018, p. 165): a choice that makes it possible to give a more explicit and reflexive character to the examination of the trace as a specific sign, while anchoring it in a defined semiosis. It shows the structuring link between the concept of the index and an approach to the phenomena of communication and meaning that is free from the linguistic model. It dispels the illusion that any sign must be symbolic, formal or conventional. In particular, it shows that the “semiotic divide” between the world of objects and the world of signs poorly reflects many phenomena of interpretation of the world that instead take advantage of the existence of real links between the sign and what it represents and establish varying degrees of continuity and separation between these two worlds. However, the return of the concept of an index to the general theoretical framework of the production of meaning, or semiosis, shows that the project of categorizing types of signs and in particular the claim to defining certain signs as being, by nature, indexical cannot succeed. The category of the index has an operative value only with regard to analysis of the processes of formation of meaning and interpretation. This is the great paradox of the Peircian theory, which we will have to explore in greater depth with regard to traces, and in particular traces of the social world. The index is only an index through postulating the reality of the phenomena it designates, but it only becomes such at the cost of a complex interpretation. This invites us to first of all look at the becoming-traces of certain objects and the means of making traces with objects, without pretending to define a priori criteria of what can and cannot be traces, and even less to identify collections of objects that might or might not be traces in themselves. The trace must be approached as a construct based on a certain type of semiosis. This is in line with the main conclusions of the contemporary, communicational analysis of traces (Galinon-Mélénec 2011; Leleu-Merviel 2017).

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Nevertheless, this point of view leads us to observe in Peirce a major tension, even a contradiction, which sheds light on the paradoxical nature of the trace, a tension and contradiction that we have already encountered in the confrontation between approaches that consider the trace as a sign and those that deny it this character. The very creation of the category of the index presupposes that certain objects are objectively related to what they represent (that their interpretant reveals a causality), which may tend to take them out of the realm of meaning and into the realm of factuality; at the same time, this category of signs obeys the general principle of any semiosis, which is that the sign is never directly related to the object, but it only becomes a sign – and therefore an index – once grasped by means of an interpretative principle. The contradiction is not insurmountable, but its overcoming is not self-evident. We can retain at this stage that the indexical sign assumes a universe of causality, but that it must construct it at the same time as it postulates it. This “double game” of the index inhabits the entire social life of contemporary traces, which assume and deny both their character as signs, precisely in the name of their claim to indexality. 2.2. The trace, appearance and presence of the past in the present We have shown above that the concrete objects that we call “traces” acquire this status only by virtue of an indexical interpretation; however, the semiotics of the index are not sufficient to characterize the schema of the trace as a social and communicational reality. There is in the trace a supplement, an excess compared to the idea of an index: although every trace is an index, not every index is a trace. We will retain, here, the hypothesis that this supplement is based on the way in which the trace appears to us, in which it is comprehended, and thus on the way in which the indexical interpretation engages with it: what I will call its aspect, its presence and its mode of existence. Admittedly, in semiotic theory, there is nothing to prevent index and trace from being treated as synonyms, but in the use and circulation of social discourses, the terms are not interchangeable. To take a few examples, it will be easier to say of the imprint of footsteps, blood drops at a crime scene or an inscription on a wall – objects that are very different in terms of their basis for indexicality – that these are traces, while we would not give this name to the words of a manager hinting at a dismissal, a sign indicating a danger on the road or the argumentative presentation of evidence of guilt in a courtroom. The trace therefore has a figurative content as a particular type of index. Which one?

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I start here from a definition that I previously presented in more detail (Jeanneret in Galinon-Mélénec 2011, p. 61), modifying it slightly based on research and exchanges that have since taken place: the trace is an object inscribed in a materiality that we perceive in our external environment and that we endow with a potential of a particular meaning, the virtual capacity to confer to an absent but postulated past a certain perceptible presence in the present. The interpretation of the trace refers it to the past, it assumes an absent object from a present object and it invites us to interpret it as an index. To simplify, this figurative content of the trace can be reduced to three essential components, the temporal aspect according to which the sign is understood, the mode of presence of the object in the sign and the evocative character or “ferment” of this sign. If we follow this approach, interpreting a sign (a perceived form) as a trace consists of asking it a particular question, which can be formulated in these terms: something or someone has been there and I want to know what it is20. This figure, in a way typical of the trace, can be clearly formulated using a notion familiar to grammarians, the aspect of the event. Aspect is a grammatical category that qualifies the predicate of sentences (to simplify what is happening) not according to chronology, but by the way the action or event is viewed and manifested. Whether it occurs earlier or later, the event can occur abruptly, continue, repeat itself, be ongoing, be completed, remain unfulfilled, etc. In this case, the event indicated by the trace does not last and is not ongoing; it has occurred in the past. This is what we call the perfect aspect. It has therefore disappeared in itself, but something of it has remained present and thanks to this presence we seek to return to this disappeared past in order to restore, if not the existence – forever gone – at least the way in which it existed. The trace must therefore be somehow returned to the past to become a sign. To be clearer, reading a Peircian “object” as a trace is to make it a sign in the present related to the past. The trace plays the role of the present mode of existence of the past in another way. It attributes to this past a modality of presence: not the presence of the existing thing, but the presence that the sign generates. The trace produces an effect of presence of the absent, it presents the object it designates, because it is seen and/or touched as a trace. Its nature, its production and its physical form show in some way that it is an index. The imprint of the footstep, that of the blood or graffiti make present an action and a scene. The link between the trace and what it indicates or reveals can be empirically captured. The trace gives the impression that we have put

20 In the words of Carlo Ginzburg (1989), who derives the leitmotiv of the trace from the metaphor of the hunter: “a narrative sequence, the simplest formulation of which could be ‘someone has been there’”.

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our finger on the real, that we grasp it. As Walter Benjamin wrote: “The trace is the appearance of proximity, however distant that which left it may be […] With the trace, we grasp the thing” (Benjamin 1989, p. 464)21. Here, we find Farge’s observation already mentioned in section 1.2: as if we had the privilege of touching reality. Hence, the most typical forms of the trace are erosion, imprinting or patina. The trace is a certain grasp of the object. However, this relationship to time is more complex than it seems. To consider the trace as only oriented towards the past would be to impoverish its temporal aspect. Indeed, the present sign refers to the past only for those who mobilize a certain future purpose, because if traces are identified, collected and interpreted, it is due to a purpose. It is always by a subject who considers it a posteriori that the object is deemed to testify to the past. The trace is therefore a ferment of indiciality, as some images are ferments of narrativity22. It is not a completed interpretation, but rather the intuition that the object reflects something. In terms of aspect, the trace is inchoative: it is about to reveal something. As Pierluigi Basso-Fossali wrote about photography (2011, p. 212): “The photograph functions […] as an indexical resource within an archaeological reconstruction, where the instantiation23 that precedes the photographic product which is being received can be reconstructed only as a junction of possibilities. In this sense, […] the photo functions only as indexical evidence, that is, as a promise of indexicality.” This observation, which is less obvious than the previous ones, is important: it is what allows the trace, as an index of the past, to be transformed, when it is turned towards the future, into data to be processed. The trace attests that it has been and can promise that it will give. This metamorphosis of the testimony of the trace into a promise of data is very important for the precise analysis of contemporary traceability devices.

21 The complete quote places the trace in symmetry with another Benjaminian concept, the aura: “The trace is the appearance of proximity, however distant that which left it may be. The aura is the appearance of distance, no matter how close what evokes it may be. With the trace, we grasp the thing; with the aura, it is the thing that makes itself master of us”. Discussion of this parallel would require more detailed argument. 22 The notion of a ferment of narrativity was proposed by Philippe Marion (1997) to designate forms of expression which, without being narrative, evoke the narrative in the receiver. I owe to Aude Seurrat (2018) the idea that the concept of ferment more generally concerns a mode of existence of different semiotic postures, such as critical reflexivity in the research that she has conducted or, here, indexicality (see section 4.2.3). 23 The attribution of the object to an authority (a situation, actors) that produced it.

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To summarize, we can describe the interpretative schema of the trace based on the three essential components of its grasp or comprehension: its temporal aspect, its modalities of presence and its mode of existence as a ferment. The trace is a material object perceived in the spatial (visual or proprioceptive) field and bearing a complex temporal pattern that may be deployed by an indexical interpretation. It is therefore not its physical nature or the content of its meaning that makes the trace, but the action of vectorizing that which is perceived through this dynamic and potential interpretative function over time. Barthes particularly highlighted this temporal dimension of the trace schema in his study on photography, Camera Lucida (Barthes 2002 [1980], V, pp. 785–891), which explores how the invention of a recording apparatus may have changed the way the trace is given to us: the technological and phenomenological component of the trace schema. As Jean Davallon wrote: “Barthes finds time at the origin of production of the photographic image, where common sense prefers space” (Davallon 1990, p. 93)24. 2.2.1. The photographic scene, here, now and in the past Re-reading Camera Lucida in the context of research on the leitmotiv of the trace deserves two important initial clarifications. First, I approach Barthes’ analyses of photography in the same way as Peirce’s texts on the index: far from any claim to account for the theoretical significance of the Barthesian theory as a whole, and even less to formulate a semiotics of photography as such, it is a question of relying on the radical character of the proposed conceptualization to specify the trace approach as an interpretative schema, and in particular to identify the consequences of the temporality of the trace. Thus, and above all, I will not seek here, in Camera Lucida, a theory of photography, but a formulation of the schema of the trace in this work applied to photography, which is in this case, according to the formula by Maria-Giulia Dondero (2015, p. 23), “a pretext to be able to discuss something else”. Beyond Barthes’ aims and those attributed to them by his commentators, I would like to define this other thing, here, as the trace schema. It is indeed the anchoring of this analysis, at the same time indexical, aspectual and figurative, that explains the fecundity of this text in information and communication sciences, both for a theory of the image as symbolic production (Davallon 1990, pp. 39–94) and for an identification of the processes of production of the informational value of the trace (Leleu-Merviel 2013). Understanding the conceptual background of such a definition of photography makes it possible to identify some ideas that can be applied to many objects capable of acquiring the 24 My interpretation, here, of Camera Lucida, in search of the trace schema, is based on that made of this text, with an informational and communicative aim, by Davallon (1990) and Leleu-Merviel (2013). For the strictly informational dimension of Barthes’ concepts (captum, spectrum, studium, punctum), refer to the latter text.

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status of traces in society. It then makes it possible to see under what conditions these analyses can inform a more general analysis of the heterogeneity of the technological, symbolic and social mediations of the trace, beyond the single case of photography. Understanding in its own logic this theory and its fecundity for a critical analysis of the leitmotiv of the trace will require, in a second step, that we understand the criticisms addressed to this (too) simple definition of photography – and thus that we wonder what status we can give, in analyzing the diversity of devices of mediation of the trace, to what Barthes has shown in the case of photography. According to Barthes, the formula it has been constitutes the “noema” of photography – which he writes with a capital letter, because he tries to characterize this type of image in its specificity. The term “noema” is borrowed from a philosophical trend, phenomenology. Without entering into a discussion of this theory, here, we may note that the use of phenomenology, after years of modeling inspired by the language model, shows in Barthes an attention to the way things are perceived, how they are given to us, body and mind25 – in Peirce’s terms, to primacy, the initial moment in the production of meaning. It is a sign of the distance he took from the logicist approach to systems of meaning which he had originally adopted at the time of his encounter with Greimas, for example in Système de la mode, in favor of our perceptible interaction with objects. Phenomenology is particularly attentive to the joint consideration of what reality gives us and how we grasp it. It is in this sense that this theory proposes a dialectic between the noesis, which is the act of thought produced by the subject confronted with the world and the noem, the content of this thought. It has been, according to Barthes, is the thought that comes to mind before any particular interpretation, when each of us is personally faced with a photograph. It is more precisely the conviction that spontaneously takes hold of us when faced with a photographic recording26. Here again, the theoretical framework is important, because it sheds light on Barthes’ approach. Indeed, Barthes, who had already sensed the particularity of the “photographic message”, really seeks to identify the specificity of this object, what photography is “in itself” (Barthes 2002[1980], V, p. 791). Not satisfied with a general approach, Barthes comes to work on particular snapshots that affect him personally, notably a photographic portrait of his mother as a child. It is this 25 We have seen above (Flon and Jeanneret 2010) that the phenomenological component, the dialectic between the way things are given to us and the way we receive them, is a constituent element of the schema. 26 As we will see below, Dondero (in Basso-Fossali and Dondero 2011, pp. 72–77) specifies the specific conditions for this conviction to be assumed, by redefining the situation that generates it as a very particular mode of receiving the image. For Barthes, in the privileged relationship with certain images, we reach the essence of photography – or at least the way it gives itself to us.

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confrontation with the absent being (disappearance and death) presented by photographic technology which ferments an imaginary return to the past, which allows the decisive theoretical advance. The aspectual point of view was present from the beginning of the investigation, but it only “takes”, in the perceptible sense of the term (Boutaud 1998), in a lived situation and becomes theory (a word that must be understood both as thought and view) within a relationship. This relationship unites a human being in a situation with a manufactured object, linked to a technological, physico-chemical device. It is the anthropological and emotional significance of photography as Barthes understands it. What he calls the spectrum of photography (the presence of the disappeared) occurs, in its terms, only through the mediation of the operator (the photographer, but especially their machine) who engages the spectator (the person who looks) in a relationship with the object and through it to something of the past. This is what made the “obscure photographer of Chennevières-sur-Marne27 the mediator of a truth” (Barthes 2002, V, p. 845). The search for a specificity of photography as an image (of the trace as a sign) is inseparable from the experience of a particular and artificially produced temporality: “it was as if I was looking for the nature of a verb that would have no infinitive and that we would only encounter already possessing a tense and a mood” (Barthes 2002, V, p. 851). The crucial nature of the temporal aspect for the trace cannot be expressed more strongly. To parody Spinoza, the trace is not experienced from the point of view of eternity, but in a singular and complex temporal configuration, from the point of view of here and now – or rather from here, now and in the past. With the trace, we are still, here, now and in the past. These theoretical considerations were necessary to fully grasp the concrete formulations of this aspectuality of the trace. Barthes first seeks to qualify the specificity of the photographic referent (in Peirce’s terms, the object of the sign)28. He wrote: “[…] I call ‘photographic referent’ not the optionally real thing to which an image or sign refers, but the necessarily real thing that has been placed in front of the lens” (Barthes 2002, V, p. 851): which is perfectly in line with the definition of the index, taken in its causal dimension, but by adding what is far from being a detail, a concrete scene, that which involves the production of the trace by the device 27 The person who had photographed Barthes’ mother as a child. 28 Barthes’ analysis is formulated in terms of general linguistics, where the “signifier” is similar to Peirce’s representamen, or perceived form, and the “referent” to the object (without total equivalence, since one of the models is binary and the other is ternary and, therefore, there is nothing corresponding to Peirce’s interpretant). Nevertheless, without being formulated in Peircian terms, Camera Lucida links to photography all the structuring features of indexical semiosis as we studied it above in Peirce’s work: in addition to the real link between the sign (in the common sense of the term) and the object, their inseparability, the always singular nature of the link that unites them and the fact that the index “says: that’s right! that’s it! that’s it! but says nothing else” (Barthes 2002; V, p. 792).

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– which, too, is not optional but necessary. For Barthes, it is the existence of this scene at the moment of the production of the trace, as well as in the mind of the person who deciphers it, which allows him to define the particular mode of functioning of this technological image. This focus of considerations that somehow weaves together photography as a physico-chemical technology and the snapshot as a proven representation explains the extended formulation of the noema of photography to which this development leads: “The name of the noema of photography will therefore be: ‘It has been’ or even: the intractable”. Intractable, because we cannot avoid the presence of photography as it is and, therefore, the testimony it bears to what has happened. We experience it as Barthes did. For example, in front of the famous photograph by Eddie Adams depicting the execution of a Vietcong officer (Pulitzer Prize 1975): “If it is frightening to witness a man’s death, it is unbearable to know that it took place while waiting forever for the moment when the gunshot will go off. We will always be too late, in the real world, and always too early, in the face of the image, to see the murder happen, let alone to prevent it” (De Duve 1987, p. 33)29. The temporal configuration of the photographic relationship is the basis for an aesthetic and an ethic(s) of image (Beyaert 2009). The intractability of photography in the most practical sense of the word (I cannot deal with a photograph without destroying its direct physical connection to its object and thus making it something other than a photograph) is also what defines it as a trace, whereas conceiving the same object as a “given” means that it is intended to be processed. This is how the particular power of photography (recording) to combine two positions, that of reality and the past, is defined. It is still necessary to fully measure the complexity of this aspect of the trace, which is oriented towards the past, but has the capacity to constantly repeat the resurrection via equipment of the vanished reality. From the outset, Barthes wrote: “What photography reproduces infinitely only happens once: it mechanically repeats what can no longer be repeated existentially” (Barthes 2002, V, p. 792). A sentence that takes on particular strength for those who have seen tirelessly play out on their screens the image of the victims of September 11 throwing themselves into the void to escape the flames. This draws our attention to the fact that, however intractable it may be, the trace is available for it to circulate in communication.

29 Cited by Beyaert (2009, pp. 48–49).

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The temporal schema of the trace is, therefore, both stranger and more complex than it seems: the photographic trace returns the sign to the past; it makes it possible to conjoin the past and its presence by presentifying it. It is always promising about what it can reveal. It also holds the capacity to reproduce, perpetuate and multiply this paradoxical relationship with time. It thus comprises a potential horizon, not of eternity, but of indefinite availability. The aspectual dimension of the leitmotiv of the trace consists of a particular complex of perfect, past, present, inchoative. Reminder, fixation, imminence and dissemination. 2.2.2. The theoretical issue of Barthes’ analysis For Barthes, this complex process sheds light on the paradoxical nature of photography: its artificial nature, which leads to denial that it is just a copy of reality, does not exclude the fact that it has the ability to appear as a presence of the object: “In Photography, what I am posing is not only the absence of the object; it is also part of the same movement, on an equal footing, that this object existed and that it was there, where I see it. This is where madness is; for until now, no representation could assure me of the past of the thing, except through intermediaries; but, with photography, my certainty is immediate; no one in the world can fool me” (Barthes 2002, V, p. 882). Madness is the transgression of the divide between the object and the sign, of the boundary between representation and presence. It is interesting to compare this analysis with Pascal Robert’s symmetrical analysis of the “paradox of simultaneity” (Robert 2005, pp. 281–297). The latter, recalling that it is impossible to be in two places at the same time, suggests that one of the functions of information technologies is to “release” this paradox, by offering us symbolic means to overcome it, without totally denying it. It can be said that photography, for Barthes, releases the paradox of successivity, according to which one should not be able to be present in two different times. The theoretical importance of the arguments of Barthes is particularly shown by the critical archaeology of theories of the image led by Davallon (1990) as part of a more general reflection on the mediatization of the image. This shows that Barthes escapes the binary opposition which semiotics and art history had hitherto shared: on the one hand, the “illusion of transparency” that makes the image a direct copy of reality and, on the other hand, the “illusion of immanence” that, reducing any form to a rhetorical effect of the text, “effectively excludes any act which would place the image in contiguity with reality” (Davallon 1990, p. 62). Barthes’ analysis makes it

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possible to maintain the particular link that the image maintains with reality and, at the same time, its symbolic scope. Davallon shows that it is by ceasing to be obsessed with the analogous value of the image (with its iconicity) in order to pay attention to its indexicality, by giving priority to its authentication value, that Barthes overcomes this aporia. Barthes does not so much seek to know how far photography is analogous to reality as much as he seeks, and this is different, to understand how photography can produce an analogy with reality at the same time as attesting to its existence. In short, it is not, as several commentators suggest, because Barthes is sensitive to the materiality of the photographic process that he confuses the sign with the object. Indeed “the realists, such as myself […] do not take the photo for a ‘copy’ of reality at all – but for an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art” (Barthes 2002, V, p. 86130). It is indeed, explains Davallon, because he approaches the image from its technical conditions of production that Barthes shows “how photography can be both ‘objective’ and ‘invested’, natural and cultural” (Davallon 1990, p. 92). This escapes both those who see the image as a reflection and those who fold the photographic trace back into a simple language. I would like to quote Davallon’s analysis at some length: “The rejection of the metaphysics of presence is anchored in the conjunction of an instrumental production that is at the same time a production of language. It is this conjunction that makes presentification not exist in itself, as a pure process (for a subject) that would apply almost indiscriminately to any object. We are faced with an instrumentalized presentification, that is to say, a presentification based on the relationship to the object, a relationship that is itself based on ‘matter’. Material formed mechanically and semiotically” (Davallon 1990, p. 92). This analysis by Davallon clearly indicates the following problematic step for us: “The whole question is […] to know what status to give to this presence” (Davallon 1990, p. 93). To put it simply, for Barthes, the particular aspectuality of the photographic trace, the material source of its symbolic significance, lies in the way it produces and attests to the presence of the past in the present. This is what makes the analysis of photography as Barthes understands it a matrix for any thinking of the trace, provided that we remember that the status given to presence depends on the

30 Cited by Davallon (1990, p. 89).

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particular and very variable way in which the different devices of production and collection of traces make the past present – a question to which the Barthes of Camera Lucida is, for his part, quite indifferent. 2.3. From the archetype of the trace to its theoretical status “Presentification does not exist in itself, as a pure process that would apply almost indiscriminately to any object”: this formula of Davallon deserves further study, as it points to a question crucial to the articulation of this book. The analysis of the “noema” of the trace as a device of mediatization of experience, in its technological, anthropological and semiotic content, has helped us to cross the gap between indexical reasoning as a form of interpretation of signs and the schema of the trace as a concrete configuration of experience. It can be said that Barthes gives theoretical status to a certain conception of photography as an archetype of instrumentation of the trace31; of equipment for its production by an instrument. This does not mean, however, that any mediatized trace is comparable to photography, nor that the analysis of the it has been gives good access to the essence of photography, as Barthes intends it. The controversies that have arisen from the reading of Camera Lucida can help us to understand this typical, but not paradigmatic, status of the photographic trace within media production. 2.3.1. Photography as a commonplace archetype There are two ways to understand the idea that photography is the archetype of trace. The first consists of identifying the results of the analysis of the leitmotiv of the trace that have been highlighted in the reading of Camera Lucida and which are candidates for characterization of the trace in general. We can advance in understanding the leitmotiv of the trace, as a particular mode of existence of indexicality, by testing, with regard to a wide variety of devices for producing the trace, the constituent features of the schema: the aspect, the manifestation, the presence and the ferment. I would like to stress in the immediate future a corollary of this hypothesis, which the rest of our analysis will have to explore in greater depth. Photography has shown the importance of a dialectic of representation – via various devices – and presence, a (re)presentation, which will be hypothesized to be structural for the leitmotiv of the trace. Photography represents objects that are absent, but this representation has the particularity of not simply describing these objects, but presenting them. This is expressed by Barthes through the 31 On the notion of instrumentation of communication through photography, see Jeanneret (2014, pp. 147–156).

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unprecedented conjunction of reality and the past. (Re)presentation devices therefore play a major role in the relationship between aspect, manifestation and presence of the trace. However, as the previous analysis has shown, the strictly technical content of these devices is decisive for these relationships, since it is likely to modify – as we have seen in the case of photography – the very nature of the experience. Therefore, production of the trace can only be described from a semiotics of the media as an artificial means of transforming forms of experience (Eugeni 2010). Direct experience of the physical presence of a trace is clearly distinguished in this context from production of the media situations in which it is presented. However, there is another way to understand the emblematic and productive role of photography, which is no less essential: a communicative and commonplace approach to its scope. We can say that photography is the reference, more exactly the dominant metaphor, for thinking about the trace today. It is not only that we tend to perceive and think of all indexical images as photographs, in the historical sense of the term (optical production of physico-chemical imprints), even though they sometimes involve very different techniques, such as the mathematical analysis of signals of various kinds; it is that the whole range of devices for producing mediatized traces, even when they are not part of the image, tends to be reduced to the archetype of photography. Controversies over opinion polls, already mentioned above, provide an understanding of this process. For several decades, opinion polling firms have been the subject of various criticisms, which are quite heterogeneous and even incompatible with each other, and which we do not have the time to study in detail here. These grievances can be reduced essentially to two categories: on the one hand, opinion polls are accused of fabricating opinion, rather than measuring it; on the other hand, they are periodically accused of making erroneous forecasts. I will not dwell, here, on this discussion, which I have already mentioned previously (Jeanneret and Souchier 1997). What interests me, here, is the way in which the institutions have gradually learned to defend themselves. They regularly state that an opinion poll is not a prediction, but a “photograph” of opinion at a given moment. The argument makes it possible to justify this activity without falling before this symmetrical double accusation, of being too effective or not effective enough as tools for mastering public opinion. What interests us, here, is that the equivalence between the devices (opinion poll = photography) works like a presumed presupposition, i.e. it is not discussed. We know that a presupposition is recognized by the fact that it remains when statements are denied or questioned: The King of France is not bald and Is the King of France bald? also presuppose the existence of the Kingdom of France (Ducrot 1972). This is the case here: the ideological dimension of the metaphor is fully manifested by the fact that the assimilation persists in the critiques and defenses of the pollsters – when their legitimacy or reliability is called into question.

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Here, I will focus on a few examples chosen from among many others that illustrate the commonplace circulation of the photographic metaphor, as a presupposition of quarrels32, through a polemical space and in discourses of different status. In 2017, the newspaper Le Monde created a digital documentary production entitled Le Décodex, which is one way of embodying the daily newspaper’s claim to help citizens decipher current events. This structure includes a set of resources marked by a strong desire for popularization, including “pedagogical articles”, one of which states “Our advice on whether an opinion poll be relatively serious or not”. This sheet states: “6. Remember that an opinion poll is only a photograph at a given time”33. The blog Le politiste, a publication structure affiliated with Amazon that mediates political science, introduces a synthesis article on opinion polls as seen by the social sciences in these terms: “Originally, public opinion referred to the informed opinion of an elite. This notion was then gradually democratized to encompass the opinion of all citizens. Opinion polls, which provide a snapshot of public opinion, have become the reference tool for measuring it. However, this measure is not without criticism”34. In both cases, there is a real desire to popularize and problematize, which does not exclude the use of metaphor and, therefore, does not lead to analysis of the specific info-communication processes of the device. Under these conditions, it is understandable that the opinion polling firms questioned by this type of press do not fail, for their part, to take up the argument among their rhetorical “elements of language”. One of the specialists in this type of argument is Brice Teinturier, director of Ipsos, who is omnipresent in the media and has made photography a staging point in ritual responses to the double accusation mentioned above. An interview with France info TV during the 2012 presidential campaign clearly mobilizes the argument: to the journalist who observes that the candidates’ positions have not yet “crystallized”, he replies: “[…] strong movements in the degree of voter mobilization have been measured: some are more so than yesterday, others less so. The photograph of the first voting round is therefore not yet completed”35: a sentence that gives its title to the article. It is interesting to observe five years later, after many polemical sequences through which the institutes were able to polish their weapons, this strategy was entirely mastered during an exchange with the 32 I use the word “quarrel”, rather than the common term “controversy”, so as not to confuse the logic of confrontation in the media and public space with the standardized forms of academic communication (Jeanneret 1998). 33 Available at: https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2017/01/23/decodex-commentlire-a-opinion poll_5067725_4355770.html. Accessed November 10, 2018. 34 Available at: http://www.le-politiste.com/lopinion-publique/. Accessed November 13, 2018. 35 Available at: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/politique/pour-brice-teinturier-ipsos-la-photographiedu-1er-tour-nest-pas-en encore-achevee_265029.html.

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journalist Bruno Denaes, accessible on the “La médiatrice – Radio France” website. The mediator observes that many auditors question the power of opinion polls. Here, is an excerpt from the following exchange: “Bruno Denaes: Regularly on the France info channel, we remind you that an opinion poll is something at a certain moment. Brice Teinturier: Absolutely. We have been reminded of this for the last 30 years. It is rather paradoxical to hear that polls are always wrong when we keep saying that there is this photograph at a given moment and then especially that we must follow the film to the end and that we must be able to, since the French are more and more mobile, they move, they react to current events, they revisit their vote… well! it is normal, I think, that the photo must be constantly updated”36. In the summary accompanying the audio excerpt, the site echoes the reasoning in terms that confirms the rhetorical victory of the institute: “It should be recalled that an opinion poll is a photograph at a given moment, not a prediction of election results two months later. It shows at this moment the state of voters’ opinion. An opinion that can change over time…” In fact, photography is part of a set of metaphors that accompanies discourse about opinion polls, among which we traditionally find the barometer (e.g. the political action barometer, Ipsos’ flagship product since 199337) and more recently radar (LinkFluence’s Radarly software suite). We also note the way in which these analogies construct a continuity between the types of traces we initially distinguished, from the physical phenomenon measured by an instrument to the mediatization of a representation, through the collection of signals. However, the model of photography has a more structuring character as a device of representation that seems to ensure contact with reality in the direct vision mode. An image that would be the manifestation of reality or the link established with reality. Photography, in which reality can be seen, therefore has the status of a social interpretant of indexical devices: it embodies the principle that “the image is the model of the relationship between the sign and the thing” (Davallon 1990, p. 562). Hence, it seems important to me in the future to give a precise, but paradoxical, status to this metaphor: assimilating an opinion poll to a photograph is an error from the point of view of analyzing mediations, which are radically different, but this metaphor has an efficiency (see section 1.3), since it bears witness to the fact that the photographic device is the dominant interpretant of any instrumentalized 36 Oral transcription (YJ). Available at: http://mediateur.radiofrance.fr/chaines/franceinfo/onse-passer-sondages/. Accessed November 13, 2018. 37 Available at: https://www.ipsos.com/fr-fr/barometre-politique. Accessed October 14, 2018.

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production of a trace. Or, at least, a certain conception of photography, whose principle was identified by Barthes. The commonplace status of photography as an archetype of the leitmotiv of the trace has two consequences, among others, upon which we will focus. On the one hand, it encloses the diversity of technical and media devices in a metaphor that assimilates them to one among others. On the other hand, it reduces the complexity of the photographic device to its sole dimension of producing traces. 2.3.2. From the trace schema to the deployment of devices Thinking about the opinion poll on the model of photography is simplistic and above all it lacks the essential elements that produce the specific efficiency of such devices, the particular nature of the info-communication processes that make it possible to develop these indices. Let us take a closer look. Opinion polls and photography share three determining characteristics that involve them both in the mediatized trace leitmotiv. They are technological artifacts, which allow the production of indices that do not occur in nature. They are constructed with the aim of producing a representation of phenomena invisible without them. They have a social operability, which depends on their being attributed the ability to attest to a phenomenon. It can be said that photography represents these three dimensions of the trace schema particularly well, and this is what gives it its archetypal character, for a theorist like Barthes as well as for the discourse circulating in the media. However, these two devices, photography on one side and opinion polling on the other side, work very differently and, for this reason, the ground of indexical interpretation is not identical. A first essential difference is that photography can produce representations of natural realities (a landscape, an animal, a meteorological phenomenon), whereas the opinion poll was designed only to describe social phenomena and loses all relevance (becomes absurd) for natural objects. Even though we stick to the more circumscribed object studied in this book, the trace of the social world, the difference is no less significant. The photograph is produced by a recording device. It is artificial, but the signs it produces are an optical process. This does not mean that it is a message without code, but it means that a purely physical process is involved in the production of this message. More precisely, in following Davallon, this artificial device makes it possible to make language with a natural phenomenon. Of course, human beings intervene in the framing and choice of the scene, but they do not intervene in the optical and chemical process that constitutes the material basis of photography in its so-called analogical mode of existence.

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The production of the opinion poll also requires, throughout the process of production, a set of very specific mediations that involve communication between people and not physical transformations: the formulation of questions, writing materials, calculations, graphic layouts, etc. If we want proof of this, we only need to think of methods of “unskewing” opinion polls, which attribute higher or lower values to certain opinions based on assumptions about the pride or shame that people have in reporting them. Consequently, the opinion poll proceeds from a complex series of successive transformations of signs – a set of semiotic transmutations – and not from a regular situation of recording the real. It is not that the opinion poll is in itself opposed to photography as a device without mediations – these are as important and complex in one case as in another – but precisely these chains of mediation are singular and, therefore, the link that is postulated between reality and the device that claims to bear witness to it is neither elaborated in the same way nor justified in the same way. Photography and opinion polling, like any media production of the trace, follow very long mediation chains before being presented to the public as direct recordings of life. To conclude that the opinion poll is not indexical but purely arbitrary, or that its relationship to the world is of the order of fiction or narrative, would be hasty. Rather, we must consider that the chain of phenomena that links the sign to what it claims to reveal is complex, loaded with social mediations, uncertain, open to misunderstanding and manipulation and in any case very poorly described by the analogy with the photographic snapshot or the measurement of a barometer. However, if it did not claim to reveal an indexical relationship between a sign (numbers, a curve) and a real phenomenon (a state of opinion, consumer expectations), an opinion poll would not be an opinion poll. This claim defines both the way in which the device is constructed and the conditions for interpreting the signs it produces (the semiosis of which they are the object). More generally, it bases its nature as a mechanism for representing politics on the production of plausible traces of public opinion. As noted above, interpretation of indices is both complex and uncertain. Therefore, the indexical value of devices is a matter of plausibility. “To be usable, a measure requires some form of plausibility” (Meadel 2010, p. 211). This is no less true, as we will see later, with photography. However, the social attribution of an indexical value to the opinion poll is verified by the massive phenomenon of “tactical voting” – the calculations that many voters make based on its results. The fact that some do not believe in opinion polls and even that their scientific fragility can be demonstrated in terms of the relevance of the information which does not alter the fact that they function as trace machines, in terms of their observed commonplace efficiency.

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The challenge of this reflection is not to engage, here, in an in-depth analysis of the opinion poll as a device. This confrontation between the camera as an archetype and the opinion poll as an example of a complex device makes it possible to define a research position and to deepen the paradoxes of the trace as a sign. Here, we find Barthes’ dilemma already mentioned in section 1.1: to free the object from its ideology and destroy it, or to respect it and preserve its mystifying character. We cannot escape this dilemma, but can try to overcome it partially. We will not assimilate all devices to photography, because it would prevent us from understanding how technological and semiotic innovation modifies the conditions of production of social traces. The researchers must, therefore, distance themselves from this metaphor. It is a condition for empirically inventorying the situations, formats and transformations by which the products of a device (in this case, an opinion poll, a ranking list, a map, a dashboard, an audience measurement, etc.) acquire the status of indices and traces of the social world. Nevertheless, this distance does not dispel two requirements that are a source of complexity – and perplexity. On the one hand, there is the need to understand what the different operations related to the functioning of the device base their claims to indexicality upon; what is the basis that justifies their character as indices. On the other hand, there is the question of why the archetype of photography, however inadequate it may be, actually functions as the interpretant of devices of production of traces. Reconciling these different objectives in one way or another is the subject of the rest of this book. 2.3.3. Photography as a pretext To give epistemological status to the trace leitmotiv, it is also necessary to define its semiotic status, and to understand the criticisms that the Barthesian theory of the essence of photography has attracted. To pose this question, I will follow the review made by Dondero (2009; 2011, pp. 17–117) on the issues of the scientific debate about photography38. Although the purpose of this chapter is not to discuss the semiotics of photography, to understand Dondero’s criticism of Camera Lucida, it is necessary to quickly locate her scientific project and the theoretical framework in which she approaches photography. Dondero pursues the project of founding a semiotics that fully takes into account the situations, supports, practices and forms of life engaged by the photographic act. It acknowledges a theoretical advance in Barthes’ explicit gesture of associating, as mentioned above, the technical dimension of the device with the anthropological dimension of the experience and considers as an 38 Here, I will save time on discussion with other theorists of photography by summarizing, very synthetically, what seems to me to concern the question of trace.

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irreversible given a concern for the technical process, which underlies her criticism of purely formal approaches to photography. She questions the archetypal status that Barthes gives to photography and, at the same time, the erasure of the semiotic and social thickness of this mode of communication by a certain causalist conception of the index – the very one we have identified above. Indeed, Dondero observes that Barthes, like other researchers who think of photography as purely recording, attributes to photography a kind of exclusive power, that of giving access to the referent. On this point, the disagreement is clear. Indeed, for Dondero, the analysis of devices must “bring into play the interpretative effects of the traces39 of production” (Dondero 2009, p. 59): therefore, it cannot be based solely on the idea that there has been recording, but goes through the forms that the imprint takes on the medium. That is, she looks at photography as a text: a text with a technological component, but really a text, engaged in a process of communication and production of meaning. With such an approach, painting and photography cannot simply oppose each other as a feigned image and an image presenting reality – in short, as opposed ideals of the mediation of reality – since in painting, too, the materiality of forms manifests an indexicality: that of the gestures that the painter made in placing the pigments on the canvas. Here again, our experience confirms the importance of the question asked by Dondero. Faced with the material traces of pictorial gestures, for example in a painting by Van Gogh, one can feel that it has been: one can have the feeling of grasping something of the painter’s gestures. This confrontation with the spectrum of pictorial gestures, and thus with the traces of the painter’s body, can deeply move us, according to Barthes’ term40. With the theoretical shift introduced by Dondero, the difference between painting and photography is redefined quite deeply. Their comparison does not then lead to an opposition between traces of reality and signs of creation, but to the highlighting of two technical, practical and poetic economies of trace production: an

39 The researchers of this approach (Floch, Fontanille, Dondero) use the term “trace” to designate elements that they place at the origin of interpretation, which means that they themselves mobilize, it seems to me, a schema of the trace. Their terminology does not distinguish very clearly between this term and the term imprint. Their criticism of Barthes, however relevant it may be, therefore leads us to mobilize in another form the noema of it has been. However, this refers, it seems, to the modus operandi, the representation of the practice of producing the text within the text. The trace would therefore represent a kind of more or less involuntary sign of production within the enunciation which is enunciated. Nevertheless, I think we need a critical analysis of this use of the idea of trace at the heart of the effort to explain a semiotic position. 40 This consideration is not only relevant to the graphic arts, since the textual genetics of literary texts (see section 3.3.2) theorize the gestures of handwriting, but also to the editorial enunciation and the documentary work of authors on their own texts.

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analysis that, therefore, sheds light on the reflection conducted above on the opinion poll. The aim is, thus, to understand, in the various media, “how traces of the productive gesture are inscribed in the text” (Dondero 2011, p. 49). Dondero’s research in this respect explicitly converges with the more general project of semiotics of the imprint developed by Fontanille (2004), to which we have already alluded on the subject of patina, and which I allow myself to interpret, here, freely enough, in order to find clues for the communicational analysis of devices of production of the trace41. Fontanille chose the term imprint to articulate between two concepts of the body, the physical body of objects and the human body, two modes of materiality whose semiotic relationship seems to him to require theorization. The semiotics of the imprint that he proposes, in this way, contributes to the more general project of extending the analysis of meaning, from its initial field of textuality, to the situations, practices, objects and media of social life and above all to give a semiotic value to the material substances of expression. One of the important questions of this research, which focuses particularly on the concept of the imprint, is to understand the semiotic processes that confer on objects of communication the ability to concretely represent the memory of our practices and particularly our actions. The imprint, as we have seen in section 1.1 with the example of the statue of Saint Peter, bears traces of interactions between our body and material and technological objects. What is of particular interest to us in this context is how imprint theory explicitly engages a relationship between gestures, practices, media and forms. It highlights, in terms consistent with the analysis conducted so far, “the inscription of forms with meaning in a material substrate” and gives a very general scope to this observation, since for a semiotics of the imprint “there is no observable meaning unless the bodies keep traces of interactions with other bodies” (Fontanille 2004, p. 264). In such a context, attention is focused on what Fontanille calls the modus operandi of the imprint, the way in which it occurs (physically, intellectually, technologically), and in production and interpretation. These are the processes by which the trace is generated and also makes itself visible and tangible, processes 41 The theoretical project of discourse semiotics and figurative syntax led by Fontanille engages in epistemological debates that I will not consider here. On the contrary, although this research reveals phenomena that are essential for an understanding of information, communication and mediation processes, particularly in terms of studying communication situations, media and figures, and as such constitutes a major contribution for ICS, it has recently and to a limited extent engaged in dialogue with this academic discipline, so that some of the authors mobilize a summary conception of information and communication, mainly technicist, which diverts them from really considering the place of communicational phenomena in the production of meaning (Boutaud in Jeanneret and Ollivier 2004, pp. 96–102). Nevertheless, dialogue is developing, particularly with the image theorists of this movement, including Dondero.

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whose great diversity of form and epistemic status we have observed with the comparison between photography and opinion polling: “‘The semiotics of the imprint’, ‘pay attention to the modus operandi of textual production, as well as that of interpretation, because it makes the hypothesis that interpretation is an experience that consists in finding the forms of another experience, of which only the imprint remains.’” (Fontanille 2004, p. 265) This approach explains the way in which the question of the relationship between photography and painting is shifted, both of which involve bodies (producers and performers), gestures, technological objects, procedures and interpretation strategies. A set of objects and processes participate in the production, interpretation and authentication of the trace as a sign linked to a memory of reality. The problem of interpretation as a meta-experience gives all its strength to media semiotics as an artificial design of the forms of communicative experience (Eugeni 2010) and thus gives us clues to the study of complex industrial devices for producing traces. In short, Fontanille and Dondero systematize and extend Barthes’ intuition of looking at a device, not as a copy, but as an emanation of past reality, while rejecting two consequences that Barthes draws from it: on the one hand, to grant photography the exclusivity of this process and, on the other hand, to extend the notion of emanation of reality to that of emanation of the referent – i.e. to conclude that the physicochemical phenomenon produces representation. They draw our attention to the fact that a painting, a portrait, a map, a curve, an opinion poll, a management dashboard must be analyzed as emanations of reality and invite us to analyze, in all cases, the processes and sources of this emanation and to understand how mediations and media transform this reality. This will guide us throughout the analysis of devices of traceability. Without overestimating the convergences between the theories, we can observe that this analysis meets, within its own conceptual framework, many of the questions we have tried to untangle here and that it offers a very rich reading of the paradoxes of the trace. Hence I quote this analysis at some length: “‘The semiotics of the imprint’, ‘provide a partial but generalizable answer to the question of reference: before asking what is the nature of the presence effect of a semiotic object (index effect, iconic effect, etc.), it is necessary to decide on the type of reference imposed by the imprint: for example, in photography, there is a point-by-point correspondence between the parts of the referent subject to the action of light, on the one hand, and those of the image, themselves subjected to the action of light. Or, in painting, there is a correspondence

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between the gestures that would make it possible to identify and identify the shape of an object and those that spread the pigment on the canvas, to inscribe something modelled on it’” (Fontanille 2004, p. 265). Fontanille, who systematizes this analysis in terms of correspondence between “the material structure of the medium”, “the type of event, gesture or technique that ensures the inscription” and “the density and quantity of the connections”42, places this analysis of the imprint as a memory of gestures in the perspective of media metamorphoses, because “the imprint never provides an exact and complete correspondence, precisely because it is subjected on the one hand to the properties of the material substrate […] and on the other hand to the modus operandi” (Fontanille 2004, p. 265). For Dondero, who shares these hypotheses, the fact of essentializing (ontologizing) photography has several consequences of which I retain the most important here which I allow myself to reformulate in my own terms, even though it means doing some violence to the theoretical framework that Dondero mobilizes and considerably simplifying, from a communicative perspective, the subtlety of her analyses. On the other hand, this has the effect of creating an antithetical system, a great sharing in short, between, on the one hand, all the symbolic languages and, on the other hand, the photograph, which, being of a technological nature, would embody the presence of reality (and, therefore, would be the index par excellence). In fact, Barthes writes: “Painting[…] can counterfeit reality without ever having seen it. The discourse combines signs that certainly have referents, but these referents can be and are most often ‘chimeras’. Unlike these imitations, in Photography, I cannot deny that the thing was there” (Barthes 2002, V, p. 851). In addition, this is, in his view, an “inimitable feature” (Barthes 2002, V, p. 853). On the contrary, the search for a single and general principle of qualification of photography redistributes in a particular way the levels of complexity of communication. It gives exorbitant power to the indexical and even physical content of the technological process, which ultimately renders negligible the most structuring elements of communication, “textuality, its objective materiality, the discursive genre of belonging, the underlying practice, the status under which it 42 Fontanille also refers to a pair of categories, range and intensity, which refer specifically to the theoretical framework of tensive semiotics, which will not be used here.

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circulates in the social sphere and the paths it takes through several social domains” (Dondero 2011, p. 32). As a result, in particular, it accredits the idea that the discourses exchanged in society could be classified according to the typology of the technological devices that support and convey them. In this way, the whole photograph could be defined as the product of the recording – what Dondero calls the ready-made: “But we know that what is intractable is rather the subject’s viewpoint: more than the photographic text, it is the subject’s viewpoint under the punctum regime that is ‘without method’. If photography unequivocally attests that something has existed, it does so because of the way we look at it, the intensity of the gaze. Moreover, not all photographs, although genetically imprints, have the same power to testify to a presence for everyone” (Dondero 2011, p. 76). Finally – and this is undoubtedly the most important point – Barthes’ analysis makes several assimilations that a semiotics of photography cannot totally admit, any more than an analysis of the processes of communication which distinguishes, in order to articulate them, objects, signs and practices can accept them. Extending freely Dondero’s analysis, I will retain three of them here. On the one hand, Barthes intends to give an account both of the technological mode of production of the snapshot and of its interpretation, since, as we have seen above, the noema of the it has been describes the existence of this scene at the time of the production of the trace as well as in the mind of the person who deciphers it. On the other hand, based on a real and essential feature of the photograph, its ability to make a recording – in Dondero’s terms an imprint – it extends this imprint without control: since the camera causes a photonic reaction, we could deduce that an entire scene has been purely recorded or inscribed. In short, Barthes does not question sufficiently what the it in it has been refers to. It is undoubtedly (relatively) easy to define what is really in front of the camera if it is a snapshot of the mother, but it becomes particularly complex, elaborated, negotiated, worked on, if it is a question of photographing an object as complex and loaded with mythologies as the writer, writing, literature (Martens et al. 2017, pp. 15–41; Martens 2018). This leads us to the last nuance brought to the universality of the “noema”: Barthes chooses, rather than studying the multiplicity of regimes of use of photography in society, to reason from a singular and personal experience, very particular, which he suggests contains the essence of a mediapractice. In my opinion, these criticisms definitively mark the limits of the purely indexical theory of photography. The question for us is to know what status we can give to analysis of the it has been. Our choice will not be to evacuate it, but to redefine its status as a theory of the commonplace approach to the trace. Reading

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Dondero from our perspective, here, we understand that the field of relevance (Leleu-Merviel 2017) of Barthes’ analysis deserves to be recognized but circumscribed. By his own admission, he dreams of an “ontology” of photography (or rather of Photography, the capital letter emphasizing this project of defining an essence): he wants to know what it is in itself (Barthes 2002, V, p. 791). What Dondero shows is that in reality Barthes does not analyze the photograph itself (who could claim that?), but rather the way in which it is charged with meaning from the point of view of reception – and more precisely of a certain reception: “Revisiting Barthes’ theory aims to reconsider the conception of photography as an unspeakable and intractable object and to show that part of Barthes’ work prefigures reflection on the different practices of receiving textuality, and that only certain images, linked to a specific receiver and a certain type of affective relationship, can be considered as intractable” (Dondero 2011, p. 72). Dondero, in this way, reformulates the Barthesian project, redefining its status far from the ontological value that the author claimed to give it: “Barthes seeks to understand how, in the face of any photography, what has been in the past can now be made present with such force” (Dondero 2009, p. 40). It can be observed that this point of view is in line with Davallon’s formula, “a new way for consciousness to move towards reality” (Davallon 1990, p. 88). To be more precise, Barthes reflects a dominant mode of grasping the photographic fact, which has historically developed through a set of hypotheses about how media devices created by human beings are supposed to give direct and transparent access to the world. As we leave Camera Lucida to move on to an analysis of devices of trace production, we can venture a rather bold conclusion, which will be worth corroborating. It takes the form of a return to the initial paradox of the trace schema, while deploying it. First paradox: the theorist of “semioclasty” seems to have lost interest, largely without Barthes’ knowledge, of the effective functioning of photography as a human technique, media form and socialized communicational practice, in order to produce an adequate theory of the system of beliefs, hermeneutical attitudes and semiotic predilections that characterizes the trace schema as it spreads in society and in the device industry. Second paradox: Barthes himself fully accomplishes this schema in finally treating the trace as an interpretative principle that gives its effectiveness to mediatization as a technique by obstructing its analysis as a sign, by making “a contract of verification and [of] relative epistemic belief” (Dondero 2011, p. 87) into something like the evidence of a shock.

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If this reading were plausible, Barthes’ revenge, undoubtedly refuted in his ontology of photography, would lie in the fact that, when the semiotics of the imprint look in these forms for the “traces” of the modus operandi, they mobilize the commonplace leitmotiv of the trace as the author of Camera Lucida identified it. 2.4. The mediatized trace, a complex info-communication device After the critical examination of indexical reasoning (section 2.1) and identification of the aspectuality of the trace (section 2.2), the reflection above based on the emblematic case of photography, its scope and limits (section 2.3) has allowed us to give semiotic consistency to the schema of the instrumentalized trace and its paradoxes. In this respect, it marks a new achievement. However, it is not enough to provide a problematic framework capable of clearly addressing the regime of traces of the social world in contemporary media. The double comparison of photography, on the one hand, with painting and, on the other hand, with the opinion poll, leads to three main conclusions. On the one hand, ways of producing indices are multiple, so that we can recognize an indexical dimension to all devices of representation: we can argue that a painting, text, speech and gesture produce traces just as much as a photographic snapshot does, but with the proviso that the production of traces, notably their relevance and/or efficiency, are not equivalent to each other. On the other hand, it is not possible to reduce the functioning of a complex media device such as opinion polling to a recording technique such as the camera – nor, moreover, to reduce the functioning of photography as a media production and social and communicative practice to that same camera. Finally, the very complexity of this type of system means that we cannot understand its social efficiency without considering both its actual functioning and, on another level, the necessarily incomplete and sometimes totally erroneous, but shared, representations that circulate in society. These three conclusions, taken on board, will guide the concrete analysis of the mediatized trace in the following chapters. To go further, it is necessary to deepen the concept of media as an infocommunication device. More specifically, it is important to understand what distinguishes a collection of tools such as the brush, palette and canvas or a technological recording device such as the camera from media production based on complex info-communication processes and mediations that are simultaneously linguistic, technological, economic and social, as is the case for the publication of opinion polls – or just as much for the exhibition of paintings in a museum or the integration of photography into magazines. As David Martens et al. (2017, p. 9) wrote about photographs of writers, “the idea of neutrality is all the less defensible since photographs are always embedded in media environments that imply specific codes, norms and axiologies that condition their appearance”.

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Nevertheless, it is clear that at this stage, it would be illusory to claim to propose a model that can be universalized for all types of devices and all social contexts. In other words, the opinion poll is neither the paradigm of any process of mediatization of the trace nor the model of any indexicality of the image. Only a concrete study of the production of traces in different media devices from different modes of capturing and representing social practices makes sense. Info-communication processes are not the same, their historical genesis is different, the way signs are produced and interpreted varies and they do not present the absent and the past in the same way. These are all mediations that modify the conditions of production of the trace schema, the meaning that can be given to it and the issues raised by its production and socialization. The project of formalizing a general model of mediatization of traces is under these conditions inaccessible. On the other hand, it is possible and even essential to identify now the major issues that cannot be ignored in order to move from a theory of trace to a theory of mediatized trace. Or, what amounts to the same thing, to identify some major conclusions of the research on mediatization in Information and Communication Sciences (Boutaud and Berthelot-Guiet 2013), which will need to be applied to the specific case of the mediatized trace. These questions will only be identified and sketched here. If it has seemed essential to me to go through this identification, it is because my exchanges with interlocutors who do not belong to the ICS discipline, as well as my reading of various works on trace and data, show quite widely that these questions do not go without saying, including in the scientific community, and that they are often underestimated. This, of course, does not disqualify this research, according to the standards of the disciplines it claims, whose ambition is not necessarily to seek to shed light on the relationships of information and communication. On the contrary, if we think that communication is more than an envelope or a clothing for the social world, we must enter into the analysis of these mediations. Therefore, taking them into account is in a way a prerequisite for entry into ICS’s debates on the trace. I will confine myself, here, to briefly presenting five issues that I believe are major and illustrate them with recent and concrete research focused on the production of the trace, in the sense used here. Although these examples are far from covering the full scope of these issues, they are mentioned because I believe they clearly demonstrate their nature and importance. These five questions are levels of problematization, problems that it would be detrimental not to raise when practicing media analysis. In short, a toolbox for the analysis of mediations of the mediatized trace. They are organized around a series of concepts-interpretants of media processes: device, text, representation, competence and format. The examples I have chosen are not only taken from the most contemporary media field, but also intended to show how these issues are part of its ongoing transformations.

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2.4.1. Device The mediatized trace is produced through info-communication devices (Couzinet 2009) that give it its form and define its documentary status. The device is an object that physically organizes communication (Jeanneret 2014, p. 11). Photography becomes a device when its conditions of communication are fulfilled: when something is built to produce and distribute communication. The camera alone is not a media device; the mobilization of journalistic snapshots in the context of information on current events (Lambert 1986; Beyaert 2009), the creation of shooting protocols by observers of the landscape or of urban development (Bonaccorsi and Jarrigeon in Tardy 2014, pp. 107–146), or the integration of photographic coverage into a documentation process for exhibition (Tardy 2012) give it this status. In terms of the production of signs, the system includes a technological substrate, goes through procedures, uses resources, involves actors with skills and fulfills roles; in terms of information, it mobilizes and updates knowledge, goals, concepts of the relevance of signs and defines the status of documents; in terms of communication, it anticipates uses, recipients and advertising spaces. It concretely translates these stances of production, information and communication into material realities realized methodically and most often industrially. The device gives material existence to info-communication processes, which results in the signs it generates being produced, manipulated and transformed. This means that the mediatized trace is never just a sign and that it goes through various media, procedures, and metamorphoses. Some objects become traces through these processes. This has specific effects on how we can mobilize the concepts on which we have relied since the beginning of this analysis. Inscriptions are made with certain tools and in certain settings; practices are convoked and represented through specific situations and resources; uses are in a way meta-uses, because any cultural or social use requires media use; defining signs as indicators of something is not only the product of interpretative processes, but also of their technical substrate and the material manipulations to which they are subject; the trace schema is not only based on the appearance and presence of objects, but also on the way in which infocommunication processes condition the spatio-temporal framework of experience and the forms of representation of reality (Eugeni 2010). Finally, the basis of the attestation value of traces (their ability to guarantee that it has been) is indirect, complex, based on heterogeneous modes of production of the index, which give very particular and particularly uncertain characteristics to the conditions of their interpretation and authentication.

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An example of this weight of processes can be given by research that has recently highlighted the importance of devices for observing museum visitors. Cultural institutions have long sought to understand visitor behavior and expectations. Indeed, the efficiency of their institutional activity, which consists of presenting culture to a wide audience, depends on the relevance of goals in relation to this audience. Communication approaches to museology have studied in detail the history of the projects through which museums and industrial service providers have translated this general objective into a complex and gradually refined set of devices for “tracking” visiting practices. From the earliest systematic surveys of visitors, photography has been used to make observations and produce what can be called traces of the visit: visitors’ gestures have been photographed, typologies of attitudes have been developed and a diagnosis made of what visitors were experiencing, including “museum fatigue” (Gilman 1911). In fact, this research required the construction of a complex system, including a shooting protocol and a method for classifying and deciphering images, then their integration into a documentary collection and their publication in the form of commented plates. Recent studies on these techniques have revealed not only their technical aspects, but also their foundations in terms of data interpretation (Schiele in Daignault and Schiele 2014). A close study of the products and their circulation reveals that the indexical nature of photography is at the heart of the scientific claims of this method, but that it is not sufficient to attest to the fact that snapshots are the trace of attitudes, annoyances and satisfactions. The construction of documents implements a conception of how physical behavior is supposed to reveal states of mind, but it also mobilizes a particular knowledge of view finding itself, guided by ancient behavioral stereotypes found in caricature of the same era (German 2017, pp. 300–309). From the info-communication point of view, this project of scientific and technical mastery of knowledge about the public requires the production of inscriptions, their contextualization by principles of interpretation, their documentary organization, their visual rhetoric and the forms of their publication. This is what makes it possible to follow, over the course of a century, the multiple forms that this project of “opening up the field of the describable” (German 2017, p. 309) takes down to the most sophisticated devices. Therefore, these devices for observing and measuring public practices have gradually become more sophisticated with the transition from a descriptive model of these studies to a predictive model. Above all, there has been an encounter between three professional fields, public study techniques based on recording tools, computer data processing and screen-based writing methods, allowing media industry players to penetrate more and more deeply into the “continuum of mediation of heritage” (German 2017). As a result, trace collection systems can help redefine the relationship between cultural institutions and media industries. In particular, the occasional intervention of media writings in the context of projects developed by

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mediators may displace the claims of digital actors to be able to respond alone to the current challenges of museums, in the name of their supposed ability to better understand the attitudes, expectations and wishes of audiences. Such a coupling of the knowledge of collecting traces with that of writing mediations would, if it really takes place – which is not certain – constitute a major change in the world of museums and cultural institutions (Jeanneret in Le Marec et al. 2019, pp. 97–123). It is then the relationship between media innovation and cultural logic that would be called into question by this massive processing of traces. From the moment of criticizing the behaviorism on which the interpretation of gestural photography as evidence of visitors’ personal experience is based, device designers assume that “the recorded traces of behaviors as a moving body are not sufficient to make sense” (Schmitt 2018, p. 123), the entire design of the device, and even the meaning given to the word “trace”, is modified. Indeed, instead of being collected to be interpreted in a more or less uncontrolled way, the trace is conceived as a resource to create situations of communication, deliberation and creation with the public. Under these conditions, the media of production, collection and interpretation of traces of practice become the main problematic object. The trace is involved in a process of rational production of reports of interaction (Leleu-Merviel 1997) and not simply observation or data collection. In other words, visitors do not lose the status of subjects participating in a communicative action in favor of a condition of objects manipulated by instrumental action (Habermas 1987). It is the concern to make room for effective interpretation of visitors, as well as reflexive feedback on how the researcher constructs, thinks and experiences the production of traces (Schirrer and Schmitt 2016) that become the central elements of device design43. 2.4.2. Text One of the effects of media devices is to introduce discontinuity into communication processes (Davallon and Jeanneret 2006). People who interact are not directly confronted with reality or other people, but with media texts, objects inscribed in a medium and shaped according to norms, conventions and genres. No indication of the social world, whether it be a gesture, an idea or a power relationship, is directly perceived. This defines the conditions of production of traces that profoundly distinguish them from the perception of natural traces, however complex the interpretation of the latter may be. In media analysis, the concept of text obviously refers not only to words, but also to any organization of signs on a writing

43 These engineering devices, in which behaviors, speeches and gestures are recorded, are, therefore, pulled between two regimes of trace, the “poetics of Mnemosyne”, which puts the trace at the service of new writings, and the “indexical paradigm” where they are interpreted to identify practices and representations (see Chapter 4).

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medium, in an audio-visual document, in an exhibition space, etc. The way in which signs are organized – their textualization – depends strongly on the properties of the media, and more generally on those of the devices that organize communication situations, roles and resources of expression. This textualization activity, therefore, falls within the definition of what may be considered as an index (of an event, a practice, social representations); or, to put it another way, a mediatized trace always consists of a text inscribed in a device. On this point, I would like to repeat what I wrote 10 years ago, in a context not particularly related to a theory of trace – a text in which I find the term: “Communication initiatives can be seen as productions, very different in their resources […] but leading to the creation of text/media complexes: a brochure, an exhibition, a broadcast, a computerized text. Mediatized communication is, therefore, above all a production of representations, embodied in texts, themselves configured in their formal properties by the features of their mediatized medium. The epistemic and axiological content of these texts, defining objects and values, is obviously at the heart of the role that the inscribed trace can play in the persistence of cultural beings, but also their distancing, manipulation and transformation” (Jeanneret 2008a, p. 166). Here, we can take again the example of the object which, as we have seen above, seems to be in the most direct contact with reality, photography. Certainly, the photograph as it appears in the viewing device attests that something has been, but no photograph ever circulates in society in the form of a simple photograph. The photograph is printed or displayed, with a frame, a caption, introduced into the space of the page, projected behind a speaker, materialized on the wall of a television studio, etc. We have seen a good example of this in section 1.1 with the circulation of images of the statue of Saint Peter on various media. Even the image analysis site No caption needed, once maintained by two researchers who were observers of current photography, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, was involved in staging, commenting and contextualizing the images, which can be found in the book they based on this experiment (Hariman and Lucaites 2007), which is unfortunately suspended today. Photographs have an indexical value, but this value only becomes information and communication through the work of the text and also the fact that the text receives a certain documentary status. This textualization work is all the more important to consider, in that it is both highly structuring yet largely unnoticed. Indeed, the metaphor of virality and contagion tends to favor the purely logistical dimension of the circulation of

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information, which focuses on the movement, reuse and diffusion of objects44 and the somewhat broad use of the term “trace” reinforces this effect. However, a closer study of this “circulation” of photographic images shows that an image only crosses media and social spaces by constantly transforming itself, by entering multiple formats and contexts and by going through the economic and technical circuits that shape its form and thus its indexical content. Confronted with media discourse on the extraordinary power of photography of Neda, a young woman whose portrait symbolized the repression of the 2009 revolt in Iran, Adeline Wrona took the time to study closely the mediations and metamorphoses by which this portrait acquired the status of an international icon. She was able to observe that this process “combines in fascinating aggregations the multiple spaces of visibility of contemporary figures” and reveals the way in which the media actors of this “virality” express a “desire for figure” that the platform formats invite us to share (Wrona 2012, pp. 390–402): “Is it still relevant,” asks Wrona, “in the current era, to speak of a ‘true’ or ‘false’ image? The particular fate of Neda’s face gives us the opportunity to read the media metamorphoses to which the images of our contemporaries lend themselves today. Manipulated by multiple actors, disseminated according to heterogeneous temporal and spatial logics, it may happen, however, that these faces may one day become fixed, according to characteristics imposed by collective consciousness, of a shared reality” (Wrona 2012, p. 402). Studying shortly after the “mythographic journey” of a photograph that fascinated the press, that of a young survivor wandering through the rubble of Fukushima, Wrona similarly shows that: “[…] from step to step, the information content changes, as a result of these successive re-releases. From collective to individual history, it is a journey of meaning that can be read, transforming the representation of the disaster into a biographical narrative” (Wrona 2014, p. 171). Here again, the study of the paths and metamorphoses of the image shows that neither the initial choice of the photograph among the many available photographs nor the transformations it has undergone to enter the visual logics of Western media escape a process of textualization and constant contextualization. This consideration of the social world and semiotic contextualization of the photographic snapshot by its publication and communication frameworks is the part of its textualization that is most dependent on the industrialization of the media. However, the controversies summarized above (Dondero 2011; Martens et al. 2017) 44 This conception of communication is discussed in more detail in section 3.1.

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also show that photography is itself a text. The fact that the technological device enacts a physical relationship contributes to the specificity of photography as a necessary but not sufficient condition. The communicative relationship it allows only exists because it mobilizes forms and processes of interpretation. Without repeating this discussion in detail here, a photographic snapshot only becomes an index of an event that took place through a series of formal, practical and social expressive mediations. The only thing of which the technology in itself empirically attests that it has been is the materiality of a photonic process, which in itself attests neither that a person was there, nor that the author of the photograph attended this scene, nor that it is authentic. The trace status of photography is constructed through the context, the cultural resources, the practices of its reception and the way in which this reception imagines the production. The conviction of the indexical power of photography emerges, as we have seen, through the way in which the production process has left its mark on the forms of the image, or rather how it is supposed to have done so, according to shared convictions and a kind of wager of trust in the camera, the device and the actors. Finally, this photograph can only be read in a certain social regime, where it receives a status, if necessary that of a document or of proof. In addition, as all the authors involved in this discussion point out, this process of qualifying photography as a witness to reality, of establishing its truth, can be manipulated, erroneous or illusory. A concrete example of the challenges of this textualization is given by the survey conducted by a team of researchers on the regime of scientific images in different research institutions (Babou 2008; Babou and Le Marec 2008). The observation and analysis of visual objects that are produced and disseminated within scientific institutions shows that we never encounter the “scientific image” as an entity with certain semiotic properties – any more than the “digital image” exists in itself (Babou 1997). The survey identifies different categories of images, which are inseparable from the media and formats in which they are developed and transmitted. These images are collected, classified and formatted, integrated into documents, and constantly transformed by the way they circulate between researchers, archivists and actors in organizational communication. They are affected by the conceptions of the scientific image and the intentionalities mobilized by these different actors, who are themselves confronted with the dominant norms of institutional communication, which increasingly over determine the setting-in-text of these documents in relation to the forms they may have in research. Anyone who turns to such corpora with the intention of finding signs of laboratory life in them only gains access through these elaborate and complex documents. The analysis of the transformations that have taken place in the contextualization of images with the project of developing large databases, then confronting them with the imperatives of interoperability and standardization of their organization (Després-Lonnet 2014; in Tardy 2009, pp. 19–38), transports these objects that had

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been produced and exchanged in different particular contexts (situations, practices, professional knowledge, social issues) towards a flexible space-time where they are supposed to be dematerialized and redistributed endlessly. However, these images, with their dual quality as manipulable objects and interpretable documents, are causing new tensions as they are still neither being mediated nor textualized. These operations lead to an abstraction of representations, a difficulty in controlling contexts, a fragmentation of objects and a disorientation of uses. However, they erase neither the inscription of images within textual structures that are now hypercomplex, nor the importance of the places and times in which they circulate, which may recompose, move, multiply and stack up, but not disappear. 2.4.3. Representation Understanding that an index of social life exists in the media only in textualized form means that the mediatized trace only makes social objects present by representing them: that it not only presents them but also presentifies them, and this due to the properties of the different text-media complexes mentioned above. The presence effect that, as we have seen, characterizes the trace schema cannot do without the constructed character of representation and this, again, whatever the technical and symbolic media in which the indexed sign regime is based. This process is very complex and deserves concrete study, device by device. For the moment, we will note the principle, before briefly illustrating it with a simple example. It is interesting to understand why, in the work already cited, Davallon (1990) must, in order to think about the media nature of the image, move from an analysis of the photographic sign to a theory of representation – according to the subtitle of the book (“From a Semiotic Approach to Images to an Archaeology of the Mediatized Image”). We must confine ourselves, here, to the essence of this subject, in particular to what, concerning the image, can guide us towards a broader analysis of the mediatized trace. We have seen that Camera Lucida marks a crucial moment in this reflection insofar as the it has been escapes the choice between the illusion of immanence (treating photography as a sign independent of reality) and the illusion of transparency (denying its quality as a sign). However, we must place this analysis, which we have isolated above, within a general framework, which is an archaeological investigation into the dynamics of knowledge about the image. Davallon, who considers this knowledge less as a circumscribed discipline than as a territory, wants to understand the links between the multiple forms of social knowledge about the image, how they encounter the development of devices and scientific theories. His investigation shows that at a time when the mediatized image was taking on major social importance half a century ago, the project to establish a science of the image in a strong dependence on the dominant science of the time,

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structural linguistics, was developed. However, the categories resulting from the formalization of verbal language have proved inadequate to account for the image, essentially because they come up against three questions that this theoretical framework does not really allow us to think: analogy, meaning in image and the function of the viewer. The mediatization of the image, and in particular the technical devices that make it possible, allow a particular genesis of forms of expression based on indexicality; the image cannot be described as a combination of signs, but proceeds from a particular textuality, not reducible to language; its study cannot avoid the way in which people, human subjects in society, develop a relationship with it45. Davallon observes that these three questions can neither be completely ignored nor fully taken into account in a theory of image conceived as a variant of language. In short, they knock at the door of the science of images, to use the Freudian metaphor of the unconscious. On the contrary, the concept of representation aims to help deal with these three difficulties by linking them: the mediatized image builds a relationship between social subjects and reality insofar as their participation is required by the very functioning of the media text. To put it simply, a media text only makes sense and has value because it implicates us in a way of seeing things. Davallon, and after him a collective of researchers studying media devices in ICS, would extend this principle, developed in relation to the image, to other media forms such as exhibition, on-screen writing, maps, data visualization, documentary systems, etc. Above all, it is necessary to understand the theoretical gesture, which is to rely on the theory of representation developed in relation to a series of devices of the classical period (portrait, narrative, map, etc.) to draw from it a way of conceptualizing the media as an organizer of info-communication relations, in particular their dimension of knowledge and power over the social world. Indeed, this theory developed in particular by Marin with regard to absolutism and extended by Davallon to the foundations of democracy in the revolutionary era grants to systems of representation a double operability, which is in reality the consequence of the principle mentioned above, that the text of representation only takes on meaning by implicating us. The devices produced by these objects make the world present to us, even though it is actually absent or disappeared: for example, the portrait of the king makes the latter present and even, in a certain sense, more present than the physical body of the king: “in place of something that is present elsewhere, here is something given” (Marin 1981, p. 9). However, the price to pay

45 The notion of the subject means that individuals and collectives who participate in communication consciously and unconsciously construct relationships and meaning, in semiotic terms the co-enunciation relationships. It characterizes actors as creators of forms of expression and interpretation.

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for having this presence is our implication, the fact that the system imposes a place and a stance for us to observe reality. Marin refers to these two sides as “presence effect” and “subject effect”; in a way, as representation devices. We will, of course, have to understand them more deeply and describe how this double game of representation works in contemporary media. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that the theory of representation already reflects the central paradox that manufactured objects can grasp the regime of the trace, such as natural objects: being constructed by the media text, representation can be forgotten as representation and erased from the world in which it involves us. The term “representation” must, therefore, be understood here in a particular sense. Some authors reject it, insofar as it seems to suppose that semiotic devices only reproduce something external to them. Thus Sémir Badir, who insists on the fact that a graph, for example – and many of the objects manipulated by data visualization are graphs – does not represent, in the strict sense, a reality but rather presents it, which means that it manifests and analyses it. For him, a graph “presents a phenomenological analysis of its object”. The structure of a graph recomposes the object, but above all it remains materially an image, even though it aims to be the image of something. The image reveals an object, but at the same time it affirms itself. It combines a visibility regime (what it shows and hides) and a visuality regime (the way in which it solicits the gaze). The analysis is worth quoting at some length: “When we allow ourselves to say, according to usage, that a graph presents an image, we see a duplication: it is the image of something that is presented, but this image is nothing other than a graphical image. It is, therefore, partly itself that the graph presents. The graph is both active and passive object, subject and predicate. It presents itself, presents itself in the image it gives of its object” (Badir 2005, p. 59). Badir’s problem is not exactly that of Marin’s, since, where the latter distinguishes the transitive function of representing the world from the reflexive function of creating a subject position, the former evokes the dialectical structure of the image itself, between presenting an object and affirming a regime of the visible. However, the tension envisaged is, in my opinion, the same. It is clear why this question leads Badir to reject the category of representation: because the image is never the reflection, even distorted, of the object, but its analysis. It is clear why Marin nevertheless uses the concept of representation – and I lean in this direction: it is that the image claims to replace the object and to present it. This is what gives it the social status of a trace.

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The analysis proposed by Annette Béguin-Verbrugge (2006, pp. 37–70) of the role of the frame in the image as text provides a very clear illustration of this principle. This, despite the fact that Marin, occasionally quoted, is not the main reference in this analysis, but Victor Stoichita (1993), historian of the institutionalization of the painting as an object of art. Béguin-Verbrugge’s approach consists of showing how spatial devices structure the act of reading and more generally the cognitive constructions of our relationship to the world. It, therefore, gives a major place to the material and visual dimension of the text mentioned above. It shows that there is a mutual determination between text and image: images in the text, images of the text, according to the subtitle of the book. However, since neither the image nor the text exist in themselves, but need a medium and a context, their concrete analysis must give a decisive role to visual frameworks that are both perceptive and intellectual, since they define statuses, affinities and relationships. The edge is a particular frame since it marks in a way the meeting of the material support and the formal medium of expression, the place where manufacturing and writing meet. Béguin-Verbrugge comments on two examples of deframing and reframing. The first is a pair of photographs used by Claude Duneton in his Antimanuel de français (Duneton 1978) to make students and teachers reflect on the limits of the chosen pieces. By cropping the same photograph, he can match it with two very different captions: a tight frame on a young black man who raises his arms suggests a race finish (caption “a beautiful victory”); a wide shot showing a shooter shows a racist murder (caption “distrust the choice of fragments”). Two photographs obviously claiming to keep a trace of an event. Two different conceptions of this evidence, without the image itself having been transformed. Commenting on the way in which the device implies the gaze and solicits stereotypes, Béguin-Verbrugge observed that “edges have the particularity of being devious signs, which often act ‘through the back door’ and are effective even though they make themselves forgotten” (BéguinVerbrugge 2006, p. 60). Any representation device, whatever the quality of the indexicality it engages, always designates a field and an off-field, the former precisely defining the interplay between presentification and involvement of the subject, and the latter marking the inevitability of the absence of part of the real. Béguin-Verbrugge’s second example corroborates this observation: it is a full-page advertisement for the newspaper Le Monde, which presents two framings of the same photograph – this time the technique consists of playing with color and black and white – one of which shows a pretty flower and the other, in a wider field, reveals a mass grave, in the spirit of Rimbaud’s Le Dormeur du val (which is obviously also a representation device). The caption says: “You don’t know anything when you don’t know everything”. Repeating the same conclusions about the interaction between the scene and the framing – between the presence effect and the subject effect in Marin’s terms, between the presentation of the object and the

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self-presentation of the image in Badir’s – Béguin-Verbrugge extends the reasoning by moving to another level. Béguin-Verbrugge shows that, if the visual rhetoric of advertising shows the difference between contextualized information and shortsighted information, the document does not question the very framework of advertising, which is also a framing. It is in fact the framing to the very edges of the page, “to the trim”, that erases choice and seems to present the scene as a simple capture of reality. Indeed, it “suggests a continuity of space beyond what is to be seen. […] This way of operating plays on the illusion of immersion in a world” (Béguin-Verbrugge 2006, p. 69). Thus, the most virtuosic use of the framework serves to confirm the supposed transparency of the information: a self-presentation of the image that denies its representational character. The analysis of the devices of “mapping” the social world, that of the multiple tools that equip our vision to reveal to us the invisible (epiphanic devices), that of the media panoplies that deploy the “smart city”46 describe the participation of computerized media in the paradoxes of representation as they have just been described. Indeed, these tools allow us to see the world from certain perspectives and this effect is inseparable from the way they summon and capture our gaze, as well as our entire body in an imaginary but lived space. This particular engineering of experience, both artificialized and naturalized (Eugeni 2010), erases its built character to present itself as a spectacle, an exploration, a territory. Yet these are indeed graphic productions that carry a certain silent but demonstrative analysis of the world, and in particular the social world. To address them, it is necessary to place at the heart of the analysis the paradox of the omnipresence of mediations and their erasure in a presentification effect, which is the technical outcome of the trace schema as a sign that denies its quality as a sign. 2.4.4. Competence Returning to the example given above of opinion polls helps in understanding the very important concept of media literacy. We remember that the media and many citizens imagine that the opinion poll works as a photograph or a barometer. However inadequate it may be, this interpretation exists and produces effects: which means, on the one hand, that it is effectively mobilized by people to gain an idea of the existence of social phenomena and their causes, and on the other hand, that it circulates, as we have seen, as a justification for the device in public debates. This belief – or, if you will, this knowledge, by giving this word the meaning given

46 For example: Robert and Souchier (2008); Plantin (2012); Jeanneret in Galinon-Mélénec and Zlitni (2013, pp. 235–267); Chasseray-Peraldi and Jeanneret in Galinon-Mélénec (2015, pp. 49–68); Bonaccorsi (2019).

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to it by Foucault, as a means of creating categories of thought – has multiple foundations, but it can be linked essentially to three sources. The result of the opinion poll produces an effect of the presence of reality and erases the conditions of its genesis; this explanation is plausible, i.e. it is based on the omnipresent and emblematic nature of photography as a trace; and finally the info-communication processes involved by the opinion poll device are largely invisible, complex and somewhat statistically complicated, so the public does not have the means to know and analyze the real mediations that contribute to its production. This is called media competence: the means available to social subjects, individually and collectively, to understand the genesis and status of media signs, and in particular, with regard to the media economy of traces, the basis of the indexicality of what is presented as such. Reflection on media competence has also developed considerably around photography, gradually extending to a wide range of image and sound recording devices. Jean-Marie Schaeffer has given the name “knowledge of the arche” (“savoir de l’arché”, in the original French expression of the term) to indicate a luminous trace that can allow viewers to understand how the photograph has been produced. “In addition to knowledge about the world”, writes the author, “you still need to have knowledge of the essence: a photograph works as an index image provided that you know that it is a photograph and what this fact implies” (Schaeffer 1987, p. 41). Dondero specifies in terms of communication processes this decisive mediation of shared knowledge: “[…] the imprint is not an a priori condition of each photographic image, but an meaning-effect of it that becomes relevant for certain states of the photographic image. It is necessary that during the interpretative act one possesses knowledge concerning the functioning of the photographic device which produced it” (Dondero 2011, p. 82). Television studies have shown the importance of this type of knowledge in understanding the relationship to “live” broadcasts, fakery and the notion of “reality television” without being trapped in the illusion of immediacy or transparency of media-based indices (Jost 2004). Above all, recent research on semiotic circulation (Boutin et al. in Berthelot-Guiet and Boutaud 2014, pp. 101–129) has underlined the importance of the social and media processes by which these interpretants of the device itself are constituted. Hence, we have to take into account not only the ways in which the index of media signs is interpreted, but also the ways in which these strategies for authenticating (Leleu-Merviel 2017) these signs are established and propagated.

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This question is particularly illustrated today in the engineering of traces developed by exchange platforms which, rather than producing content themselves, occupy the “passages” (Jeanneret 2014) between cultural and economic mediation, such as the famous GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple). Researchers’ attention are legitimately occupied by the fact that the “algorithms” mobilized by these actors capture traces carry out a form of surveillance, serve as a resource for an economy of attention, and affect our private lives. It is clear that this society of traces generates a lot of research mobilizing the idea of traceability (Merzeau 2011; Citton 2014; Cardon 2015). However, it is no less necessary for the designers of these systems that the ability to track and grasp our lives be socially authenticated and made credible in terms of efficiency, if not in terms of relevance. As mentioned in section 1.3.2, surveys show that many students give credit to Google based on an efficiency finding (“it works”) that makes them reluctant to learn the concept of relevance in theory (Simonnot and Gallezot 2009; Cordier 2017). Paradoxically, work that criticizes algorithms on the basis that they think and grasp reinforces this confidence in the relevance of efficiency. Guillaume Heuguet’s research on the YouTube platform and the way it has managed to gain a hegemonic position in the recorded music sector (Heuguet 2018) marks a decisive place in the genesis of an economy of media traces. In fact, like the works cited above, it underlines the role played by the collection of traces of practices to ensure mediation between actors in a complex market: major players in the cultural industries, amateur users, the mass media and advertisers. Operations of collecting traces “transform practices into signs, and signs into vectors of transactions in the market for advertising space” (Heuguet 2018, p. 423). Research problematizes this info-communication device in three ways that are not very present in the criticisms addressed to the GAFA companies. First, Heuguet observes the gap between what YouTube claims to observe and account for and what it manipulates and submits to semiotic transmutations. These are essentially records of technical operations recorded in the materiality of the machines that the control room presents as “views”. However, as we have seen with historians, linking an inscription with a gesture, a fortiori with a cultural practice, is extremely delicate to establish: seeing a video is as difficult to define as reading a book, and there is no evidence that a connection is an indication of a complex act such as really watching a show, let alone enjoying it. Hence, Heuguet describes the very complex devices of technological processing, on the one hand, and visual staging, on the other hand, to reduce the uncertainty of the link between material inscriptions and uses. Above all, the analysis reveals the considerable resources that the company is developing to convince funders that these inscriptions are indeed the traces of something. Indeed, “this […] engineering of inscriptions and symbols […] presents multiple points of discontinuity and fragility: the very existence of a referent to the

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sign (as in the case of fake ‘views’), the quality of the relationship of the sign to the referent (the possibility of linking a click or time spent to the phenomenological texture of a presence or experience), or even the qualification of the referent itself (how to identify what the click or scrolling of a video is worth)” (Heuguet 2018, p. 439). Therefore, the company must prove that it is actually measuring something. The device is called TrueView – which might be called real-false view, like there are real-false passports. The declaration clearly shows by its insistence the decisive character of the effective diffusion of knowledge of the arche, in this case plausible explanations of the functioning of such devices – in themselves as impossible to observe in reality as the PageRank algorithm of Google, the company that owns the two brand tools. Of course, this is not the case, and the calculation of such traces puts at a distance the practices it claims to present, viewing and listening, according to a logic previously observed (Colombo 1986). However, what matters to the actors of this industry of intermediaries is that this knowledge is credible and that, grosso modo47, everyone, ordinary users as well as economic experts, builds a representation of YouTube as an industry for measuring real views. 2.4.5. Format The above example could just as easily be used to illustrate the notion of format. Indeed, not only, as we have seen, are indices inscribed in a system, textualized, represented and based on knowledge, but also they are created within the media system itself. The last question is, therefore, very simple to formulate: media devices not only deal with traces, but also create the formats of inscription in which these traces are produced. If we return to Sylvie Leleu-Merviel’s definition of the nature of the trace, an indexical retention of marks recorded on a physical medium, the media not only collect and process these retentions – which they obviously do – but also make them possible and even produce them by creating inscription devices. Format can be defined as production by industrial means of forms of expression. In other words, it is a textualization matrix. In the field of television, it has developed particularly recently because it enables audio-visual genres to be industrialized, standardized to a certain extent, recognized as standard programs by consumers and produced on an international scale (Soulez 2016). However, format is older and has been a structuring element of the mainstream press since the 19th Century: chronicles, editorials, interviews, press articles, soap operas, short stories, etc. What is of particular interest to us here is that some media formats are intended to encourage the inclusion of testimonies on opinions, tastes, practices and projects.

47 A description of the semiotics of the grosso modo is provided in section 4.2.3.

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Indeed, the improvement of the media and their objective of building audience loyalty (readership, audience, community over time) has led to the increasing development of the delegation of enunciation: a process that consists, rather than producing a speech themselves, of “giving a voice” to actors in society, both to enrich information, create stronger links with their audience and, in some cases, obtain free content. We will have to examine this process in the next chapter (section 3.4), because it is crucial in the transformation of the media into collectors of traces of the social world. It should be remembered that each time a medium delegates a function of expression and testimony, it does so by creating a format to do so and, therefore, the testimonial function of these texts is inseparable from the conceptions of the social world that have governed their production. The importance of media formats in the production of traces of the social world appears especially when one considers the documents that researchers use to analyze the use of the media themselves. Letters to authors and publishers kept in archives (Lyon-Caen 2006), on-air discussion programs (Cardon 1995), sections devoted to readers’ letters (Damian-Gaillard 2012), discussion forums about the press, press archives and radio and television mediators and requests are used. Since the networking of computerized media, many researchers have observed the written recording of many opinions, judgments and predilections, because in computerized media many practices that were previously invisible and unwritten give rise to inscription, until they led to a real society of availability (Pène 2005). The practice and its norms are expressed and exposed simply because forms of on-screen writing call for “requisition” (Labelle 2007) and “discursive conatus” that capture the desire to write, to express oneself, to be an amateur author (Candel 2007; Candel and Gomez-Mejia 2009). The communication of practices and preferences leaves a trace in the development of media designed specifically for expression, from the exchange of information between fans on so-called “social networks” to derivative fictions developed on various media (François 2013). However, this analysis takes on a larger dimension when we look closely at how media formats, particularly the power to write and even the duty to write formats, have become the main initiating media for this requisition. Indeed, the media writing formats available to “amateurs” have become more sophisticated and increasingly oriented towards the ability to collect inscriptions and transform them into traces. “Small forms” (Candel et al. in Davallon 2012, pp. 165–202) have multiplied and combined into increasingly integrated sets (Labelle 2007). From this point of view, the decision of Facebook to display the blank page at a time when most actors were multiplying colors and animations was a very clever tactical move to appeal to writing. Then, the creation of the “Like button”, replacing the more or less daunting signs of evaluation with an appeal to emotion and experiential gesture (Candel and Gomez-Mejia, in Barats 2013, pp. 141–146), provided an ideal medium for

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collecting multitudes of traces which then allow, after various computations and visualizations – after a chain of semiotic transmutations (Jeanneret 2014, pp. 468–470) – the presentation and exhibition of an image of mass, consensus and trend. This is obviously at the cost of decontextualizing these minimal statements from the places and times of their first formulation (Després-Lonnet 2010): which brings us back to the initial consideration of the powers of the device. These different dimensions of trace mediatization guide the analysis that follows from a singular semiotic and communicative modality, the written trace (Chapter 3) and the way in which the transformation of texts into traces takes place within the media (Chapter 4).

3 The Complex Genesis of the Written Trace

The following lines constitute, like the blog dedicated to the statue of Saint Peter discussed in Chapter 1, what is usually referred to in sociology and in ICS as a “trace of use”. On January 4, 2019, I was writing the present chapter. I was looking for an example that could introduce the scope and complexity of the role of the written word in the social deployment of the trace schema as just described. One of the documentary actions I performed was to look up the phrase “leave a trace” on a search engine. I made this written gesture because I knew from experience that this expression generally translates into initiating the creation of a written document, which was immediately confirmed to me by the list of answers that appeared on my computer screen. Among the texts that appeared on this list, one of them struck me, because of the explicit nature of the social media trace that it unambiguously presented. It was an article in the French regional newspaper Ouest-France dated 8 June 2016 entitled: “Leaving a trace on the Net after your death”1. We learn that two 50-year-olds from Brest (France) created a website dedicated to a plan of leaving a trace, and, here, we can find a report in line with the dominant topos of start-ups. “A few years ago, while looking for childhood friends, Didier Tousch learned of the death of an old girlfriend. He then found it sad not to know what had become of her. He then came up with the idea of Bescrib, a social network that would allow him to ‘leave a trace’ before the big departure”. A trace of use mediatized in the form of a press report. As I continued my research, I learned from several journalistic sources that the team of 1 Available at: https://www.ouest-france.fr/high-tech/internet/laisser-une-trace-sur-le-netapres-sa-mort-4281667l. Accessed January 4, 2019.

The Trace Factory, First Edition. Yves Jeanneret. © ISTE Ltd 2020. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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designers and developers led by this manager of several media companies had been working for five years on the creation of this “social network” launched in 2015. I find in it the explanation of the brand name (“be scrib”, “being one’s own scribe”2), and I confirmed that the company is in business3. On Bescrib’s entry screen, I can read the baseline (slogan): “Engrave a lifehistory on the web” and I am invited to watch a video presentation of the service. The oralized text in voice-over is as follows: “Roger is 76 years old. He watches a show about Egypt whose history was immortalized by scribes. He wonders how to leave a trace of his time on earth. Sylvie, 49, has just lost her mother. She would like to write her biography and share the memories of her life with all those who knew her. Sébastien, 14, is curious. He would like to know the history of his ancestors. Having said that, how do we do that? Bescrib, the first social network dedicated to memorializing individuals, responds to their expectations. In this way, Roger will be able to create his memorial: he will designate legatees, who will take note of his last wishes and perpetuate the memory of his life. Sylvie, soothed, will be able to write the biography of her missing mother: her children and grandchildren, as well as all Bescrib subscribers, will be able to consult and expand the memorial with texts, photos and videos. Sébastien will be able to navigate through his family circle to discover the events that have marked the lives of his loved ones. Bescrib will allow you to write the story of your life or that of a missing loved one. In this way, you can perpetuate your family’s memory and pass it on to future generations.” As these words unfold, the images follow one another on the computer screen, while in the foreground a hand (without visible body) traces letters, small scenes drawn in the graphic style of a comic strip, and a large number of “icons” (pictograms and ideograms). Some of them represent commonplace objects: a map illustrating the evocation of a “passage on earth”, question marks suggesting users’ questions, a family tree embodying the family line. Others are media images (text, photo, video) or graphic objects (signature, book cover, documents, prints). The gesture of writing, drawing, signing, sticking labels is triumphant. Page layout (lists, tables, circles, friezes) is omnipresent. All media forms are represented, but it is the graphic gesture that governs them, culminating in a large global schema that combines in a panoramic graph the vignettes of people engaged in practices. The scenography of the models of use of writing, immersed in the phantasmagoria of the scribe, is expressed in typical 2 Available at: https://www.bretagne-economique.com/actualites/brest-la-startup-bescriblance-un-reseau-social-dedie-aux-histoires-individuelles. Accessed January 4, 2019. 3 Available at: https://www.bescrib.com. Accessed January 4, 2019.

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gestures of manipulation of a whole range of written forms associated in a single act of tracing the forms, and, through them, a life4. Finally, while observing this little phantasmagoria of the gesture of writing, I could not help but think of the formula adopted by Louis Marin (1981, p. 10) to define the representative device: “Effect and power of presence instead of absence and death.” The media objects which follow one another in this short account belong to the general regime of the written trace (or record)5 of practice. We can observe that they can by no means be reduced to what is usually called writing, and even less to alphabetical writing: not only do they rely entirely on the “written image” with all the richness of its graphic forms (Christin 1995) and in particular a poetics of figures and intervals (Christin 2009), but they display – on the screen, on the page – all the most common media forms in our society: the recorded voice, the viewing of audio-visual documents, on-screen writing, photography. However, it is written forms (search engine results, embodiment of practice in the graphic gesture, expression of ideas by pictograms and ideograms) that give us access to all the traces of use, whether or not they be actualized or anticipated. In short, this scene identifies a new archetype: if photography is, as we have seen in Chapter 2, the archetype of the ability of technical devices to record that it has been, writing is the archetype of the gesture of inscription, of its power to record what has been, to circulate it, to make it manipulable. At the same time, the very extensive and very heterogeneous collection of actions I had to carry out to find these uses of the written trace and the no less disparate collection of those presented by the commercial document show how, with the written trace, we move away from the claim expressed by photography to perform a direct grasp of reality. This short account of a very elementary documentary journey can put us on the path to the profound reasons for the omnipresence of the written word in contemporary media. Despite its summary nature, it shows with great clarity why it is necessary to devote an entire chapter, here, to the question of writing. Nevertheless, this term requires clarification. Readers who are not familiar with my work and that of the researchers with whom I have been able to collaborate should be aware that writing is taken into account in this context in its relationship with language, but is by no means reduced to a transcription of it, because it is considered on the basis of the materiality of the devices of inscription, in its visual dimension, in all the complexity of the graphic forms it mobilizes (Christin 2012).

4 This analysis is inspired by the analysis of “phantasmagoria of the screen” in contemporary public spaces (Bonaccorsi 2012) and the role of “panoplies” in guiding media practices (Labelle 2007). 5 For ease of reading, we use “written trace” as its use in the original French sense of the term (“trace écrite”) extends to “written record” in English

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Writing is the most complete form of inscription, or, to put it another way, of the documentary processing of traces and as such, as we will see, it is the subject of a very dense discourse on the written trace; this is why written forms are the subject of particularly intense instrumentalization in the computer industry; as such, studying the genesis of the written trace in its specificity allows us to understand more broadly how mediation and mediatization are necessary for the production of traces of the social world. The reader should be aware, however, that just as analysis of photography does not explain all the technical features of indexicality, the study here of written texts does not reflect the extreme diversity of ways in which a media text can make a trace. What is commonly referred to as the “written trace” – a very common and institutionalized term, for example in the justice system, in business or in schools – is not a simple object but a complex whole. The concepts we have identified among historians who examine the book for the sign of social realities (inscription, index, use, practice) remain decisive for describing the written trace, as they were for photography. However, to identify the specific contribution of writing to the production of mediatized traces of the social world, the most important feature to be taken into account is what has been “traced-out” (tracé in the original French expression of the term). The written word only makes a trace (index of practices) because it takes the form of what has been traced-out: by the production of visible and readable material forms on a medium. The written word is above all what has been traced-out: it is a traced-out feature before it is a trace, and it is always the product of a traced-out feature without always being constituted as a trace. This conditions the fact that written signs often become traces, and more easily than speech. In turn, the graphic as a traced-out feature requires consideration in a constellation of notions: medium, gesture, image, text and reading. As a first approach, we will say that a written trace is an inscription borne by a medium which consists of an image embodied by a traced-out material; we observe that it acquires the status of an index of practices and social forms by virtue of reading it as a text. Naturally, these concepts evoke others: for example, the inscription of a traced-out feature on a medium raises the question of the relationship that can be established between a gesture and a technological inscription device. To summarize: inscription, index, use, practice, traced-out feature, medium, image, reading, text, gesture, device, all in a schema which associates the aspect of the it has been with the effect of the presence of a visible and tangible object. We have definitely buried the notion of the naturality of the trace. Yet, as we will see in the rest of the book, this is what allows the most naturalized deployment of trace and traceability in the writing of contemporary media. In this particular case, I will focus successively on four questions: what particular link does writing, as a symbolic system based on inscription, have with the schema of the trace? What role does the traced-out feature, as a mode of

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existence of the gesture of writing, play in the genesis of the trace? In what capacity can writing attest that it has been? What does it mean in terms of a theoretical and practical stance to privilege the point of view of the trace in writing? Research carried out in the anthroposocial sciences and in particular in the Information and Communication Sciences (ICS) can shed light on all of these points. 3.1. The available inscription When we suggest, as I did above, an analogy between the position of writing as the archetype of inscription and that of photography as the archetype of the trace schema (it has been), this does not mean that the two statuses are equivalent, nor above all that their genesis responds to the same conditions. In reality, it would be better to speak, when it comes to writing, of a prototype of the recording of the real in the form of inscriptions. Indeed, when in the second half of the 19th Century, the camera, then the phonograph and the cinema emerged as incredible prodigies in the recording of practices – prodigies with which literature at the end of the century was literally obsessed – writing had already acquired, over thousands of years, through its perfection, its generalization and its social circulation, the position of reference in terms of recording techniques. This is attested to in particular by the lexicon of the end of the century: photography, phonograph and cinematograph refer to the Greek root meaning “writing” (graphein), the same root which Plato had already made the symbol of the process of technological inscription in the 5th Century BCE in the Phaedra. This asymmetrical parallel between photography and writing draws our attention to a component of the trace schema to which we have not yet given the interest it deserves, the historical construction of the technological, symbolic and cultural conditions of objects becoming traces. The emergence of recording technologies (all of which involve inscription on a medium, plate, film, roll, etc.) has suggested to contemporaries a kind of hyperbole of the schema of the trace (appearance and presence) in the form of fictional and deploratory narratives on what humanity has lost during the time that writing was the only way to fix the traces of the past – this is grammatically reflected in the use of the past conditional. When François Arago presented the invention of “photographic drawings” to the Academy of Sciences in 1859, he declared: “Everyone will be struck by this reflection, that if photography had been known in 1798, we would today have the faithful images of a good number of emblematic paintings, of which the greed of Arabs and the vandalism of certain travellers have forever deprived the learned world” (Arago 1859, pp. 26–28). The mischievous Villiers de L’Isle-Adam does not hesitate to go further in his novel L’Ève future, a prefiguration of artificial intelligence. Giving a dramatic role to the invention of the phonograph (another candidate for capture of the it has been), he shows a fictional Edison in the grip of “whimsical and bizarre reflections”:

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“How late I have arrived in Humanity”, he murmured. “Why was I not one of the first-born of our species! … Many great words would be inscribed, today ne varietur – (sic) – textual, at last, on the leaves of my cylinder, since its prodigious improvement makes it possible to collect, from now on, sound waves from a distance!… And these words would be recorded with the tone, timbre, accent of the flow and even the pronunciation defects of their speakers” (Villiers 1986 [1886], p. 770). Observing that God has but rarely wrote, he concludes: “Nevertheless, He has only allowed His Gospel to be printed, not phonographed. However, instead of saying: ‘Read the scriptures!’, we might have said: ‘Listen to the sacred vibrations!’ – In the end it is too late…” because, the fictional Edison regrets, “Fate did not allow my instrument to appear until nothing that man says seems worth preserving anymore” (Villiers 1986 [1886], p. 776). 3.1.1. Inscription as a framework for thought Let us move away momentarily while noting the proximity of the trace schema to the fear of loss and to the value judgment on culture, to which we will return later (section 4.3). For the time being, it is the historical temporality of the techniques of inscription that will retain our interest. If these authors, and many others, refer to writing both to claim to surpass it and to claim its qualities, it is because Western tradition has conferred on this symbolic system above all the status of a trace. I am not saying here – far from it – that the fundamental nature of writing is a trace, but rather that in the history of philosophy, industry and social records it is above all seen as an inscription which creates a trace. A tradition that seems to me to be largely dominant today in social science research on computerized media as well as in the activity of projects of innovation and of which, for this reason, it is necessary to have a clear understanding. The thesis developed by Plato in his dialogue Phaedra6 occupies a paradigmatic place in this definition of writing as an inscription, not only because of the very strong way in which it is presented, but also to the extent that commentaries upon it, whether inspired by it or opposed to it, largely reproduce its major presuppositions. Plato does not strictly speaking expound a theory of writing, but rather a theory of its social role and its use, writing being clearly positioned as the paradigm of technological invention, its promises and its risks. However, if the main thrust of his thinking is to combat the pretensions of technology to shape the human mind alone – which gives this text particular relevance today, whatever its limits – 6 I have proposed a more complete analysis of this text, of which I will only mention a few elements directly related to the subject of this book, see Jeanneret (2000, pp. 17–39).

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and to affirm the importance of the engagement of subjects and their uses, the controversy that it has aroused in contemporary philosophy and which inspires certain forms of research relating to digital writing based on the category of trace retains the Platonic point of view, while at the same time in a way reversing its meaning and polarity. Plato wrote in a society where writing occupied an important place, symbolically subject to the primacy of speech (Detienne 1988). Ignoring Sumerian writings, Plato attributes to the Egyptians the invention of writing; but, as an actor in a culture entirely marked by the alphabet and the conception of writing as a transcription of speech – and who cannot decipher ideographic writings – he makes no mention of the particular expressive power of writing as a material object and as an image that modern research on the plurality of writings, for example that of Champollion, will rediscover much later (Christin 2012). As such, Plato’s thesis has attracted well-founded criticism that highlights the ideological character of the primacy of the word, conceived as a direct and authentic expression of thought. In fact, in the statements attributed to Pharaoh and then to Socrates, in response to the claim of the thaumaturge god Thoth to revolutionize culture – similar in some respects to today’s conquering computer science – writing is above all approached as a second and degraded translation of the word: a logocentrism which, from Rousseau to anthropology and linguistics, has only asserted itself (Derrida 1967; Derrida 1972), and that underestimates the specific and autonomous cultural value of the written word (Goody 1979), which finds its source in the inability of the modern West to think of visual writing other than as a draft of the alphabet (Christin 1995). This controversy, too briefly mentioned here for the record, will not detain us in the immediate future. To deepen the analysis of the written trace, it is less important to take sides in this debate than to understand the issues at stake. Plato does not evoke – we could say – the properties of writing as a symbolic system: its relationship to the medium, its character as an image, its ability to create thought that is not dependent on the alphabet or logic, its relationship with the act of reading, etc. In short, Plato, who makes letters (τα γραμματα) the model of the things of technology (τα της τεχνης), produces an abstraction of writing that reduces it to its functions of recording and inscription of thought-speech (the word logos refers to both language and reasoning). This is why it highlights in a particularly spectacular way what I call the logistical dimension of communication7. Without wondering whether or not the written word supports thought of a different nature from that of the spoken word, it measures the difference that separates the spoken word in living dialogue from the same written word. 7 For this category, see Jeanneret (2008a, pp. 139–151).

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Plato highlights, for simplicity, four features of writing thus conceived as an inscription technology: the exteriority of the written word in relation to the body, the artifactual status of the inscription, the process of delegating thought to material objects and the effects of the dissemination of texts. These four ideas durably define what is called the written trace, whether or not we deplore this process like Plato or glorify it like most contemporary philosophers and mediologists. For Plato, writing, as a technique for inscribing information outside the body itself, is a dead thing outside of the subject’s engagement. This is why he rejects the idea that the written text itself can constitute a memory and attributes to it the sole character of a tool for recollection. In anachronistic terms, it can be said that the philosopher contrasts the dimension of human use and culture with the thaumaturgical claims of technological innovation. However, Plato attributes important effects to writing, which can be summarized in the ideas of delegation and delinking. Certainly, it is in a negative way, depending on the ideology of interiority and speech, that these effects are described. The most important thing, however, is for us to understand their nature. Delegation is the fact of relying on an external object for a task that in Plato’s eyes concerns the person – in contemporary terms the subject and not the object – in terms of their cultural responsibility: that of elaborating thought and memory, a reality that in his eyes will cease to be alive if it is entirely delegated to the technological object. Delinking is the breaking of the material and existential link that unites thought and discourse referring to a particular situation and thus, inevitably, the fact that writings circulate and escape both their site of relevance and the authority and control of their author. These arguments have received three major criticisms from the authors cited above: that the devaluation of writing as an exteriority reinforces the illusion of thought which is sovereign, ideal and in contact with being; that there are technologies of intelligence, so that distinguishing thought and its tools is illusory; that the criterion of mastery of texts by their author is a normative conception of culture, to which we may oppose the fertile value of dissemination and polyphony of enunciations, of letting go. Nevertheless, the questions asked by Plato, freed in whole or in part from their normative burden, remain relevant: when discussing the specific value of educational tools and media and more generally of distance in the mediation of domain knowledge (Mœglin 2005; Mœglin 2016), when we define the power of software as the delegation of intellectual operations to the machine (Rieder 2006), when we observe that the computer network brings to a new level the delinking of information in circulation from its context of expression (Merzeau 2013), when we try to grasp the weight of the devices within practices without underestimating their creativity (Béguin-Verbrugge and Kovacs 2011; Cordier 2017), when we warn the writers of research against the risk of cutting themselves off from contact domain-knowledge linked to particular situations and encounters (Le Marec 2013), we underline, whether we welcome or regret it, the strength of the logistical component of writing in the current transformations of culture.

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3.1.2. Grammatology or philosophy in the camera obscura Under the name of “grammatology” (the theory of writing), Jacques Derrida formulated a radical critique of the concept of writing as a transcription of speech he named logocentrism. In his critical reading of Plato, Rousseau and their linguistic and anthropological heirs (Derrida 1967; Derrida 1972), he points out that for them speech guarantees man’s supposed capacity for direct access to being as well as to thought, to the extent that language is precisely considered as an instrument for the presence of thought in the world. Writing, secondary and flawed, is only transcription, indirect, cut off from being, marked by the mediation of technology. Logocentrism is, therefore, also a form of egocentrism (a belief in the sovereignty of the ego) and an ontology (a belief in the accessible presence of being). In Derrida’s eyes, the theory of writing as transcription, defect, delay and impurity has as its essential function only to reinforce belief in the sovereignty of the self and in the accessibility of being: this theory of writing as a supplement (grammatology) encloses the philosophical thought of the West in a metaphysics of presence. This critique of logocentrism will be taken up, although with a very different meaning – as we will see below – by the theorists of graphic reason as well as those of the written image, who will continually denounce the reduction of writing to the transcription of speech. For them, writing is not, as in Saussure’s linguistics, a code for transcribing speech, but a specific form of expression and thought. However, Derrida’s critique of logocentrism at the turn of the 1970s responds to a very different aim from that of the following decade’s work on the specificity of writing as an image-based symbolic system (Christin 1977), on the resources of thought it offers as a technology of the intellect (Goody 1979), or on its complex relationship with orality (Ong 2014) – all works from which our analysis will take inspiration, but which do not primarily address writing as a trace. Derrida intends, at this stage of his journey8, to engage in the questioning (in his terms, the deconstruction) of the illusion of an ideal and sovereign thought that characterizes a much broader intellectual project in which he participates, and which Barthes was able to summarize, at one stage,9 as the “death of the author” (Barthes 2002 [1968], III, pp. 40–45). The remark is important because, for this reason, Derrida grappled in these works with the conception of writing held by Plato, which he chose as a framework

8 Precision is important: I do not claim, here, to offer a critique of Derrida’s philosophy of which I am quite incapable, but I deal with the theory of writing as a trace produced in two of his works, De la grammatologie and La dissémination, which can shed light on the issues of the development of mediatized traces of the social world. 9 For his part, Barthes revisited the finality of this judgment in Le plaisir du texte. On this question, reference can be made to Jeanneret (2009).

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for discussion, by virtue of the lasting structuring role it held for Western metaphysics. Its purpose is not to propose another semiotic conception of writing, but to literally reverse the conception of the world expressed in Plato, Rousseau and Saussure. Paradoxically, it ends up strengthening, by radicalizing, the categories on which the disqualification of the written word is based. It is a question of valuing these traits of writing decried by traditional philosophy, of making them, on the contrary, the resources of a thought capable of recognizing its materiality, its dependence on otherness, its definitively bifurcated, suspended character and its inability to claim a transparent relationship with the world. This is why we will find, given a positive value – or at least granted relevance – the major sources of Socrates’ fears: exteriority, distance and dissemination. In this context, writing is fundamentally defined as a trace, because it always refers to something else: it shows that what is external to us, inherited from the other, is always there, that our thoughts are always dependent and never reconciled with themselves. However, by parodying Marx and Engels on ideology (Marx and Engels 1968, p. 50), we could say that Derrida reverses Platonic thought “as in a camera obscura” (and no longer a camera lucida as in Barthes): writing is first, it precedes speech and spirit; exteriority is the very condition of thought; our speech is always expressed in the afterthought of what we inherit from our physical, material and technological condition. It is the presumption of the trace that logically leads to the idea that writing, a sign of exteriority and distance from ourselves and the world, was always already present in our minds as an “engrammatic” form of thought, the “Ur-writing”: a paradoxical reprise of the Platonic idea of thought as “writing in the soul” (Van Sevenant 1999) in a philosophical system that is, in itself, a weapon against the philosophy of Plato. However, the radicalism of this movement, which leads to dispossessing the mind of its claim to autonomy, requires extending the concept of writing so far that it somehow loses all specificity. Anne-Marie Christin, whose project is, on the contrary, to recognize that writing has a particular symbolic virtue – and who for this reason refuses to think of it as a mere trace – has perfectly summarized this paradox, which is that by indefinitely extending the space of writing, Derrida turns away from recognizing its specific relevance. Indeed, she writes: “The central question of this project was not writing itself but a new definition of the subject. However, the very novelty of this definition, which breaks logocentric individualism by introducing the Other into the ego, has concealed the fact that the thought of the trace that justifies it […] is based on the written word only to the extent that it cancels it” (Christin 1995, p. 16).

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3.1.3. Ichnology as radical logistics There are two main reasons why the theory of trace is unacceptable for AnneMarie Christin: on the one hand, it inevitably renews the primacy of inscription by neglecting its character as an image, which leads Derrida, like other authors, to consider movement towards the alphabet as inevitable; on the other hand, and above all, the notion of trace turns writing towards its past (it has been), whereas what interests the semiotics of writing is the poetic force of writing, the fact that it solicits a reader and foments a creative and committed thought. The essential thing at this stage is to remember that in Plato as in Derrida, the notion of trace expresses a bias. The written trace is not the nature of the written word, but a particular look at its materiality as an inscription. The written trace is the semiotic expression of a primacy given to the logistical dimension of culture. A bias which, although contested and questionable from several points of view, is clearly privileged and naturalized by contemporary technological devices for the production of social traces. We must be careful not to caricature Derrida’s thought, which never proceeds to a logistical reduction of culture, insofar as for him, neither meaning nor expression are closed and his thought is at the service of the permanent movement of textualization of the world. However, the fact that his theory retains the primacy of inscription and trace is not without effect on the way in which it is mobilized in the concrete analysis of media devices – the mediatized fabric of trace. It is, therefore, important to focus on the theoretical and practical consequences of the logistical reduction of writing. Many social science authors committed to the analysis of transformations in media writing draw inspiration from the critique of logocentrism and mobilize the category of trace in order to affirm the technological content of thought (Stiegler 1994), to account for the transmission of ideas through human and non-human mediations (Latour in Baratin and Jacob 1996, pp. 23–46)10 or to produce a theory of informed documentary production by grammatology (Hudrisier 2000). However, none of these authors presents Derrida’s grammatology as a way of fully describing the life of culture. It is in the book by the philosopher Maurizo Ferraris entitled Documentalità. Perche è necessario lasciar tracce (Documentality: Why it is Necessary to Leave Traces) (2009) that we find this claim developed into a coherent system. The book offers a series of observations on rediscovering concepts previously developed in the field of philosophy within the Information and Communication 10 For a critical analysis of Latour’s trace, see Jeanneret (2008a, pp. 143–151).

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Sciences; as such, it provides an interesting contribution to the study of the role of written forms and documentary constructions in the genesis of cultural and social powers and, above all, contributes to socializing this type of analysis in philosophy and politics. To say it more generally, many pages contribute to a critique of the everyday. To take a few examples, Ferraris resituates, as documentary practice analysts had done before him (Gardies 2011), the utopia of the computer network in a long-term perspective, referring in particular to Otlet and Lafontaine’s Mundaneum (Fayet-Scribe 2000). In this context, Ferraris counters the opposition of writing to the screen (Souchier 1996) in favor of the multiplicity of writing media; he observes, as I had been able to do with Vannevar Bush’s Memex (Jeanneret 2001c), that these precursors who dreamed of a kind of magical access to audiovisual media have missed the decisive mediating role of writing. He agrees with Sophie Pène’s (2005) analysis on general mobilization in all gestures. Ferraris publications therefore give new visibility to issues that are little used by anthroposocial sciences outside the ICS. He writes, for example: “[…] what Otlet did not foresee in his prophecy – and which on the contrary is at the centre of my catalogue – is that access to documents would be made possible through writing. When we realise that, it is the computer keyboard that Otlet’s vision lacks, there is only the screen” (Ferraris 2009, p. 7)11. On this basis, Ferraris confirms the importance of a shift in the political prerogative (Robert 2005) through the ability of private actors to manage the inscription and documentation that was previously the responsibility of the State, and takes up the idea that data on writing nowadays acquire a transcendental character for culture (Jeanneret 2000, p. 130). It is certainly to be welcomed that various ICS researchers who had not paid particular attention to these issues discover them when reading Ferraris, on the occasion of the latter’s press articles and invitations in an interdisciplinary context. Ferraris’ work, therefore, includes stimulating and provocative proposals on the contemporary industrialization of written traces (Ferraris 2016). What interests us, at the stage of the problematization of mediatized traces, is the very clear-cut nature of his theoretical options. Indeed, we find in Documentalità (Ferraris 2009) an extreme version of the folding back of writing onto its logistical dimension. This is for several reasons. First, if Ferraris claims Derrida’s theoretical framework, in particular the very broad conception of writing mentioned above, it translates Derrida’s critical questioning in a pragmatic and empirical way, which profoundly modifies the theoretical and political framework of the concepts. To keep to the point, these changes – based on an explicitly announced gap – are of three kinds. 11 Our translation.

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On the one hand, Ferraris’ writing enters the canon of analytical philosophy, which favors the use of common sense, thought by distinction and reasoning by the absurd, which has the effect of reducing an open theory on the constant production of meaning to a circumscribed inventory of stabilized objects. Then, Ferraris’ theory of documentality claims the empirical observation of objects, supposing the possibility of establishing an ontology in the form of a catalog of the objects of the world, which is excluded in Derrida by the critique of presence. Finally, Ferraris frees grammatology from the deconstructionist perspective to propose a conception that he calls “systematic” (positive) of this science of writing, in reality translated into a science of the trace, into “ichnology”, a term borrowed from the archeology of remains. “The transition from grammatology to ichnology […] is the transition from a critique of logocentrism to phenomenology in the way that inscription can reflect the whole of social reality” (Ferraris 2009, p. 177)12. These differences lead Ferraris very far away from Derrida’s political and theoretical issues – we will not dwell, here, on this aspect of the question – but allow a particularly explicit, peremptory and reductive formulation of the role of writing which interests us in this respect. Documentalità can be considered as a particularly accomplished summary of what can be achieved if the written trace is totally reduced to its logistical dimension. The radicality of the theory is essentially based on two assumptions: on the one hand, the fact of considering writing as the most elaborate form of the trace; on the other hand, the choice of assigning the status of social object only to acts recorded on a medium. To understand these biases, it is sufficient, for example, to oppose them to the approach to uses formulated by Michel de Certeau, which assigns a strategic role to the scriptural economy (to the fact that writing embodies a desire to control the social world), but contrasts to it the dynamics of uninscribed practices, vectors of social creativity: for Certeau, the project of writing and governing practices always comes up against what escapes it and never stops running after the ever-elusive horizon of omnipotence. It can be said that Ferraris’ ichnology proposes a version of society reduced to the sole role of the scriptural economy13.

12 Deconstruction is Derrida’s response to Barthes’ paradox cited in section 1.3, the one which imprisons the researcher between submitting ideology to analysis and thus destroying it as such and respecting it and restoring it to myth. Grammatology deconstructs, i.e. it reveals the internal contradictions of a conception of thought and communication and delivers it into the suspense of its mythical functioning, without replacing it with a competing claim to truth. This connection is my own, and it would not necessarily have received the support of the philosopher. 13 For an analysis of the dialectic between social practices and scriptural economics in Certeau, see Jeanneret (2014, pp. 366–388).

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Social ontology (the nature of social beings) is expressed in a rule formed by an equation: “Object14 = inscribed action. Social objects result from the recording of acts that involve at least two people and are characterized by being recorded on any physical medium, from marble to neurons, through paper and beyond, to the web. My thesis is that with this simple rule we can account for all of social reality” (Ferraris 2009, p. 176). The extension of the power of writing, moreover, expands to include the whole of culture, so that Ferraris, not lacking in audacity, proposes to replace Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit with a phenomenology of the letter (thus giving a rather paradoxical scope to the Biblical opposition of the spirit and the letter) and undertakes to demonstrate it from the methodical translation of each of the categories which in Hegel define the positive spirit and the absolute spirit into categories of inscriptions. “The phenomenology of the mind”, says the ichnologist, “is the phenomenology of the letter, because it is the basis of the constitution of the social world and the intentions that make it possible” (Ferraris 2009, p. 31). Therefore, not only is society born from inscription, but the social subject itself. “The becoming-subject of a natural object with representations depends on a system of inscriptions that transforms the natural being into a social being”. In short, if a trace is only such in the eyes of the beholder, the mind itself is defined as a collection of traces. Nevertheless, it should be noted that this unlimited scope of writing has two drawbacks: on the one hand, the reduction of writing to its dimensions of inscription (to the detriment of its symbolic organization and its formal traced-out feature) and, on the other hand, the extension of the category of inscription to any type of medium. This is why it is difficult to know whether the theory is really radical or whether it leans towards tautology – in terms of analytical philosophy, whether the thesis is strong or weak. Indeed, if the social world is not recognized in any space other than that of writing, it is encompassed in an Ur-writing that corresponds to every possible type of trace, which makes it impossible to distinguish between oral interaction and written text and even between thought and communication; on the other hand, if the mind has no other destiny than to convey traces, these traces are tendentially capable of representing any form of production. The (Ur-)writing is based on “any kind of medium”. A brief inventory conducted over the pages shows that this category of the medium includes: stone, skin, paper, metal, silicon, magnetic tape, files; as well as DNA, a handshake, an exchange of views, rituals, family stories and, above all, “people’s heads”, the “table” of their minds which “is 14 These are social objects. Natural objects are supposed to be able to be grasped in themselves most often by experience and common sense. Social beings exist, for their part, only if they are recognized by subjects.

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not a metaphor but an inevitable and functional representation of the mind” (Ferraris 2009, p. 236). In short, the infinite scope of writing goes hand in hand with the difficult constitution of its space, its very floating definition and its absence of semiotic characteristics. We could discuss at length these very clear-cut biases and the reductive consequences they have for the conception of culture; but I think that would be quite sterile. On the other hand, this ichnology, conceived as a doctrine of the trace, describes in a particularly clear way the schema of the written trace brought to its limits. The vocabulary of analysis favors a series of terms that the author strives to distinguish and articulate between them, but which above all constitute a coherent, even indistinguishable continuum: trace, recording, inscription, writing, Ur-writing, document. I will retain here one of the proposed typologies, by way of example, because the main thing is not the individualization of these categories, but the processes that they allow to be actualized in the author’s “world catalogue”. Trace is the most encompassing category: it refers to an object close to Leleu-Merviel’s diaphoria, but already interpreted, charged with an aspectuality and a presence: “By traces, I mean any form of modification of a surface that refers (by recalling it) to something that is not present” (Ferraris 2009, p. 200). Trace is a seminal datum, the foundation that supports the entire social process. It is rooted in the ability to “keep track” (in Italian, to “hold a trace”), a natural animal instinct shared by human beings (reading is a natural act), but which they bring to an unprecedented level of achievement – this is the definition of humanity – through technology, writing and the document, all of which belong to the broader category of inscription. In one of the passages in the book (Ferraris 2009, pp. 201–220), the author distinguishes three stages of ichnology: the trace, which encompasses all forms of logistics; registration, which concerns the trace inscribed in the mind of at least one subject (and thus allows the representation of objects); and inscription, which opens the perspective of the social world because it is shared – in any way – by more than one subject. The main thing, here, is not the stabilization of categories, which in reality are variable15. The essential point is the central fact of a definition of writing as an inscribed trace associated with the process that justifies it: fixing, transmitting and publicizing objects. The categories (trace, registration, inscription, writing) do not distinguish themselves as communication objects or processes of a different nature but as stages in a process that leads from nature to society through the recording of objects and their circulation.

15 Expression is sometimes distinguished from inscription and sometimes assimilated to it, registration is, here, specific to the mind, elsewhere extensible to any medium, the categories of technological inscription and the document interfere with this gradation.

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In particular, writing is not an object of a different nature from inscription, but only – and this is very much in a pragmatic conception of the social world – its most accomplished form. If inscription is “the quintessence of social objects”, writing is recognized as the “archetype of the trace”, not by virtue of particular semiotic properties, but by virtue of its very logistical potential. Writing carries to the extreme the power of delinking (Merzeau 2013): the written sign is “a trace that can also be reproduced (although not necessarily) in the absence of its author” (Ferraris 2009). Hence, we return to, although given a positive value, Plato’s definition. In this context, it is not easy to understand what would distinguish writing from inscription, because writing is essentially an inscription and sometimes it seems to be the most sophisticated form of inscription and sometimes it encompasses all its variants. There is no criterion that distinguishes writing from technological inscription or the Ur-writing from the trace. Ur-writing, at the root of the registration process, and writing, at the summit of social development, has the status of boundaries at the ends of a continuous process that allows, through the logistics of transmitting objects, to create fixation, stability, availability, circulation, reproduction and sharing16 (to use some recurring terms). What we share, basically, are objects and acts, the only really social objects being the inscriptions of acts. In the end, what stands out most strongly from this particularly methodical and economic construction in terms of concepts is a logistical conception of the social world. In this context, what are the values that are conveyed by writing? It records, it fixes, it preserves, it reiterates, it makes public, it circulates. It de-contextualizes objects and makes them available, taking them out of the control of their authors. This explains why ichnology refers to the model of propagation17, which is confirmed by the central reference to the concept of imitation and its main theorist, Gabriel Tarde. In a rigorously pragmatic conception of the social world, the trace is finally reinterpreted as a trace of an act and society as a pragmatic result of the acts that constitute it. There is no symbolic space of signs and texts. The document is an afterthought which, when it is weak, records only one fact and, when it is strong – and, therefore, gives rise to a social object – records an act. Everything is based on inscription, but nothing is of value except acts. In short, the written trace appears, in a theory that particularly extends its scope, as the ultimate form of efficient logistics for the circulation of cultural objects, approached from a pragmatic point of view as well as ways of acting. The radical model of ichnology, however reductive it may be, is a resource for critical analysis of the design of traceability. Indeed, the particular convenience that writing has long offered in collecting, fixing, reproducing, detaching and classifying texts explains 16 In the sense of holding something in common (in Italian condivisione). 17 For an analysis of this model, see Jeanneret (2008a, pp. 28–34).

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why, in media capitalism, the written trace is attributed the role of a major vector of the propagation and instrumentation of texts conceived as indices of social acts and practices. 3.2. The thickness of the traced-out By evoking the thickness of what has been traced-out, which should in no way be confused with the trace, I will not pretend, like Ferraris, not to use a metaphor. The written traced-out feature has a real physical thickness, even when it seems to exist only in two dimensions: the whole history of writing shows the importance of the volume of notches, lines and impressions, which is one of the components of the historical relationship between the physical traced-out feature of the written image and its successive media (Christin 2012). To keep to two simple but telling examples, specialists in the first Sumerian writings underline the link between the evolution of clay techniques (notching of the calamus and hardening of the tablets, for example) and the progressive refinement of the traced-out features towards “cuneiform”, a fully symbolic system related a posteriori to incisions of nails (from the Latin cuneus) by archeologists (Durand in Christin 2012, pp. 29–40). This type of demonstration was made by historians of the book for the birth of printing, which, in its first version, imposed a dissociation of the image and text, hitherto intertwined on the body of the parchment and even in xylography, insofar as the text was printed in relief on leaden characters and the image in intaglio in the physical or chemical notches of the engraving (Febvre and Martin 1958, pp. 129–152). However, the thickness that is mentioned here, by metaphor and in the absence of a purely “analytical” concept, is at the same time physical, technological, symbolic and social. We could even say that this is what prevents us from reducing writing to inscription pure and simple, and above all from assimilating it to a writing in the soul, assuming that the latter expression has a meaning. The traced-out feature is first and foremost what resists the written trace, while making it possible. Conceptually, moving from a definition of writing as one of many varieties of the trace, in all its scope, to an approach through the traced-out feature is not only a complement but also a shift. The ichnology presented above, written by an analytical philosopher, is inseparable from a level of analysis and a discipline of discourse. It has a panoramic, typological and generalizable character. It approaches the circulation of culture, its triviality, as a system that is modeled and not as a reality shaped by history, to use the two general modes of scientificity distinguished by Jean-Claude Passeron (2006). Its purpose is not to describe specific historical situations or to go into the details of media, formats, aesthetic and semiotic forms. The definition of philosophy as an inventory of exemplary objects is not included in situations and texts. When certain contexts, situations or anecdotes are mentioned, it

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is for demonstrating, most often through absurdity, a rule. Undoubtedly, the logistical conception of writing is fairly well suited to this global view; in any case, it protects it from criticisms that could be addressed by a study at the level of objects and practices. ICS cannot be satisfied with this perspective, this scale or this way of validating convictions. It is, therefore, from another point of view, linked to a different focal point of observation, that the notion of trace needs to be specified and that it meets a category not reduced to logistics, the traced-out feature. As we change focus, we will not fail to discuss the complex processes referred to above by the general term of inscription and about the practical, symbolic and technical mediations that characterize the gesture of inscription. 3.2.1. Actualized presentification in absentia To understand the importance of what has been traced-out, it is necessary to look back at the conclusions of the analysis proposed above of the trace schema. To do this, I will start from three crucial proposals that have already been mentioned. The first, that of Davallon, insists on the various ways in which devices make reality present: “Presentification does not exist […] as a pure process [but as] an instrumentalized presentification, i.e. one that is thought from the relationship to the object, a relationship that is itself thought from ‘matter’”. It is, therefore, necessary, in order to understand the trace value of written forms, to explore the particular way in which the matter of the written word is formed mechanically and semiotically. The second, already present in Barthes’ work, invites us to think about the place of reality in such devices not in terms of representation but of genesis: not to take “the photo for a ‘copy’ of reality – but for an emanation of past reality”. It was also noted that, contrary to Barthes’ opinion, this emanation is not specific to photography and that it involves a complex series of mediations. It is, therefore, necessary to understand in what sense the written trace emanates from a referent (or in any case, to free oneself from the linguistic, from a reality) and what it is. The third requirement, formulated by Fontanille, generalizes this principle to all types of devices: “Pay attention to the modus operandi of textual production, as well as that of interpretation [and make] the hypothesis that interpretation is an experience that consists in finding the forms of another experience, of which only the imprint remains”. It is then necessary to understand “the type of reference imposed by the imprint” in the case of the written form, knowing that inscription cannot be reduced to registration.

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We will, therefore, say that the written trace presentifies the practices from which it emanates and imposes them, or at least suggests their referent in a particular way. Like all indirect indices of the social world, even the imprint of a footstep, and unlike any communication between bodies – whether a physical encounter or oral interaction – the written trace is marked by discontinuity of the communication process: the actors and their practices are not directly present there but are presentified through objects. Like photography, and unlike a footprint, the graphic traced-out feature includes a gesture of intentional mediatization and carried out by using objects created by humans: in this case a graphic device and a reading device, which may be unified or separated. This does not mean, as is too often said, that written communication is disembodied: like the photographic snapshot, the written word imperatively invokes (not optionally, to parody Barthes) the body of social subjects in at least two modes, in production and appropriation. It takes a body to take the photograph and another body, or the same body but in another posture, to look at it; it takes a body to write the text on a medium and another body, or the same body but in another posture, to manipulate it and read it. On the other hand, writing cannot present the image of the body (it can represent it by description); it carries marks because the body was necessary for its production; in some cases, for example, not only by annotation but also by the wear and tear of objects (wrinkling, which is a kind of equivalent of patina), it carries marks because the body is necessary for its manipulation and reading. What the written traced-out feature presents, then, are the gestures that make its practice possible. In other words, if writing emanates from the body, it is essentially because its very existence stems from a gesture performed with the help of a technological device, that this technological device allows a presentification of the gesture and that, for this reason, it is always possible to grasp the written word as an index of this gesture. At this stage, it is indeed the written traced-out feature, the material inscription of a form linked to a gesture on a medium; the semiotic functioning of a particular writing system or the strictly verbal or figurative content of a particular text (the textuality of the written word), for their part, present a much wider range of practices. To take a simple example, the collection of Egyptian ideograms presents, through the figures they mobilize, a set of objects that were familiar to this people, the realia of the pharaonic universe (Vernus in Christin 2012, p. 59). These processes will be discussed in Chapter 4, but again, as in the case of the mediation/mediatization coupling, it is important to understand the asymmetry of relationships. The traced-out feature is essential in relation to the text. There can be a presentification of the gesture of inscription in what has been traced-out without presentification of an image of the social world in the text, but the opposite is not true: there is no text without a traced-out feature, therefore no written expression without a gesture of inscription. The core of the written trace is the gestural content of the traced-out feature.

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3.2.2. Between inscription device and graphic gesture The history of techniques for producing the written trace is largely determined by the innovations that have marked the process of recording written signs. Evolution of the technologies of medium and graphic gesture has affected the modus operandi (Fontanille) of trace production, and thus the relationship to the object (Davallon). Let us be clear; the gesture of producing and grasping inscriptions is always present and decisive in qualifying the written word as a trace. This gesture can be mediated in many different ways. In this way the written trace can, for various reasons, acquire the status of index regarding the gesture. The very complex history of relationships between the page, as a symbolic space of writing, and its different material media, from the first clay tablets to the fragmented materialities of the computer (Souchier 1999) shows the importance of the historical metamorphosis of the conditions of possibility of what has been traced-out (tracé) and its reading. The scope of technical mediations of reading/writing does not only – probably not mainly – concern writing as a trace, since writing devices have played a decisive role in the invention of forms, power relations, possibilities of access to texts, etc. These changes have redefined in a very profound way what can form the basis of the indexicality of the written word – in Leleu-Merviel’s words, the authenticating of what has been traced-out, in a written form, as a trace. The research of Philippe Quinton, graphic designer and ICS researcher, allows us to rigorously ask the question of the relationship between a traced-out feature, gesture and practice. In resolutely opposing the widespread idea that the body would be removed from the equation in computer writing, Quinton situates current innovations within the long history of the various technologies that have followed one another in combining the properties of the medium, the graphic gesture and the engagement of the body. This refers to a long history, because there is never writing without a human body, as well as no writing without a technological object. In all these successive modes of production of the written trace, and even so-called digital writing, “we can speak of a bodily device capable of modelling inscription because the body deposits through its mediation an indexical part which remains readable in many graphic aspects” (Quinton 2000a, p. 127). From this very rich analysis, I will retain here three ideas that directly concern our investigation. First, with the development of technical devices for industrialized inscription and tracing, the graphic gesture and the engagement it implies do not disappear, but they are profoundly transformed. Indeed, the graphic gesture is complex and is not limited to a physical procedure. It is a gesture in the strong sense which engages the body and mind. It implies both a drawing and a design, in Quinton’s words. This is why, when it comes to understanding how the written trace can today have the role of testifying to a very wide range of social practices, it is necessary to return to the complexity of the graphic gesture whatever it may be and

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to take into account the intellectual, cultural and creative content of the disciplines of the body. The second reason to reject the widespread idea that with computer technology, writing would become immaterial and disembodied is that the production of texts on this type of medium requires intense activity and does not fail to generate effort, constraints and even suffering. Third and finally, Quinton’s observation of computer writing practices in the fields of research and training18 identifies an issue of power in the battle between the writer’s designs and the claim of the informational Ur-text19 to take control by substituting automatic forms for the physical traced-out feature of the gesture. In this context, observes Quinton, those who have a personal practice of a structured gesture over time on different media are more likely to be able to keep control – i.e. to be the authors of drawings which are in accordance with their design20. This is why the right way to think about the dialectic between the evolution of devices and the evolution of modes of involvement of the body that writes is not to oppose the practices of the body to those of the instrument, but rather to understand how the use of different instruments (because all writing is through the use of instruments) engages “traces of the body in design” (Quinton 2000a, p. 127). In this regard, Quinton distinguishes three regimes of inscription: in what he calls matrix inscription “graphic traces… maintain a contiguous relationship with the hand or tool that left them” (Quinton 2000a, p. 134); in modulation21 the device fixes and transfers the signal – and thus transforms it – but keeps a link with the bodily gesture; finally, in modeling, the machine, while presenting to the user scenes which mimic the physical gesture, produces shapes that owe nothing to the path of the hand, to the ductus. Though indexical reasoning is evoked by all these traces, its nature changes profoundly. In the first case, the physical contiguity between the gesture and the perceived form is similar, in a more complex way, to traces on the ground or the patina of objects. At the other end of the process, with the last stage, the link between gestural engagement and modus operandi of the layout is loosened, until it disappears completely. “It is necessary […] to comply with the programs (codes) of the computer, understood as a medium–material–media-tool assembly, which

18 See, for example, Quinton in Souchier et al. (2003, pp. 102–105). 19 “Informational Ur-text (in French, architexte): a tool present in screen writings that is at the origin of users’ acts of writing and reading and governs their format, so that our own writing is conditioned by the existence of this writing previous to ours” (Jeanneret 2014, p. 10). 20 This analysis was confirmed a few years later by a survey of communications agencies, students in training and a graphic design specialist on the use of PowerPoint software (Tardy, Jeanneret and Hamard in Tardy and Jeanneret 2007, pp. 141–171). 21 A notion close to what I call semiotic transmutation.

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require the inscription to rationalize certain parameters which were hitherto intuitively managed” (Quinton 2000a, p. 135). As a result, physical learning of the graphic act is profoundly modified, as is the modus operandi of the genesis of forms. This was showed very early on by research on the uses of devices of this type concerning pedagogical or experimental gestures (Béguin-Verbrugge 2001; BéguinVerbrugge 2003)22. As for the conditions for interpreting the inscriptions, the reader no longer retains their previous access to the physical marks of the physical gesture, but they only grasp it through its effects in terms of the activation of industrialized symbolic forms. This analysis by Quinton is crucial for the mode of existence of computer-mediated written traces: indeed, insofar as the gesture of writing consists not of a direct physical trace strictly speaking but of the physical activation via tools (“peripherals”) of industrialized and modelized formal structures, the capture and interpretation of uses and practices is done by means of these forms. This gives particular power to those who create what I have previously called formats and small forms (section 2.4.5). Nevertheless, throughout this process of metamorphosis, practice is never absent, and the use of text, however modeled, can always be interpreted as a gesture, in the social sense of the term. Nevertheless, it takes a lot of lucidity (a complex social knowledge of the archaic graphic) not to confuse these formal mediations with a simple physical gesture and to discern the mediations. Many ethnographic or sociographic studies on digital networks, for example, process written exchanges via industrial platforms and standardized forms of expression as if they were direct encounters between actors, and this confusion plays an important role in the prestige of systems for tracking practices. 3.2.3. The traced-out feature, a figure of mediation Since writing presentifies the absent within the discontinuity of the communicative process and, therefore, implies, as much as photography can do, bodies – the body that traces and the body that appropriates – or rather mind-bodies which write and interpret, it does not follow that the physical act of inscribing and manipulating the inscription in a situation alone provides the intelligibility of the act of writing as a social, symbolic and communicative reality. The analysis just presented of the mediations of the body in writing may give the impression that the observable scene of the face-to-face encounter between the writer/reader and the page/screen reflects the traced-out feature as a technosemiotic object. Yet, a careful reading of Quinton’s work on graphic design as a professional practice (Quinton

22 For a more complete analysis of this phenomenon, see (Chasseray-Peraldi and Jeanneret, in Galinon-Mélénec 2015, pp. 49–58).

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1997), as a reality involved in organizational life (Quinton 2000b), and his observations on the physical engagement of ordinary readers (Quinton in Souchier, Jeanneret and Le Marec 2003, pp. 102–104), show that the graphic traced-out feature escapes this limitation. Putting this body of research into perspective, the global analysis Quinton proposed of design as a practice, profession and object of training (Quinton 2002) makes it possible to identify three essential reasons (among others) for which what has been traced-out escapes the sole category of the record. In clarifying from the outset his point of view that “designs and creation are not art but communication processes” (Quinton 2002, p. 11), which implies analyzing what is at stake “at the material level of design and manufacture (technosemiotic) and mediation (semio-pragmatic)” (Quinton 2002, p. 11), Quinton captures the technological gesture of inscription or manipulating what has been traced-out, as can be done from time to time by an individual with a device, in the “relational set that is built between [the] artefact, its actors and users, as well as the contexts in which these interactions take place” and places the latter within a broader practice and a personal and collective culture. In the field of empirical research, we can take the example of the schemas that Quinton created as part of collective research on the appropriation of network text (Quinton, in Souchier et al. 2003, p. 105), itself informed by the observations that he and Dominique Cotte made in the context of training novice users (Cotte 2002). Reading the schemas and their comments, we understand not only that the stances identified are dependent on the temporality of computer functionalities, with engagement and waiting phases, but also that they reflect more general attitudes towards the task, the culture, the technology and more generally a body style (hexis). In other words, careful observation of practices in situations shows that this or that defined functional gesture implemented by a network user (enter, click, follow with the pointer, to use the descriptive categories of these diagrams) must be considered for a moment as a process and that it is meaningless in itself if it is abstracted from a practice that includes its purposes, its reference values, its reasons. It should be noted that, on this point, the analysis of the graphic gesture in ICS parallels that of the gesture of reading in history (see section 1.2) as well as the criticism of Schmitt’s behaviorist approach to the gesture (see section 2.4.1). It is informed by the relations maintained by the subjects regarding such an object of information (in the case of the research mentioned, the search for information on GMOs), the machine and the media text (semiotic predilections). By taking one more step, Quinton opposes the idea that computer mediation would replace the culture of drawing, showing the weight of history through which individuals have passed, over the long term of their training, in the way they

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approach a new tool. To summarize, if we want to establish a trace of a particular practice, we will have to choose a conception of the practice itself. By deepening this reflection, we reach a more demanding stage in the analysis of the graphic process, which consists of recognizing the traces present upon writing surfaces as communicative: taking seriously the fact that they are intended to enter into situations of social interaction and to be read by subjects. In the survey mentioned above on network practices (Souchier et al. 2003, pp. 93–156), the self-confrontation of subjects with their “navigation”, after observation, allows them to define stances towards the forms that they have been able to read and manipulate, to constitute them into texts, and to do so according to certain semiotic preferences, which are socially acquired ways of giving meaning to visible forms. The decision to click is actually an act of gestualized reading: it is not only the translation of an intention or a predilection, but an interpretation of what the subject has in front of them, a hermeneutical decision. This approach, which is inspired by writing as the image given to be read (Christin 1995), logically leads to mobilizing the category of the index, whose great flexibility has been seen in section 2.1, less in causal reasoning about what has been than in the communicative movement of appropriating the text on the surface of the screen, of what can happen. For the professional graphic designer, the traced-out feature is significant less through in what it can betray than through what it can engage with, in potential creativity or constraint. Thus, intermediary signs that make it possible to navigate the network (traces which are particularly effective on the screen): “as indices, they have extensions outside and inside the artefact in presence, they are in a dynamic relationship with something else, other signs, other texts or images located in the same space or elsewhere” (Quinton 2002, p. 67). Finally, the researcher intends to give a political and ethical dimension to the graphic gesture – we can say that it is the common thread of all Quinton’s research – and as such he considers it essential to place this or that gesture, this or that practice, this or that rhetoric of writing and image in the space and time of graphic design as an issue and as a power. This is because “graphic communication supports power relations, more or less building ‘places’ for actors in the messages” (Quinton 2002, p. 137). Finally, the decompartmentalization of the graphic gesture simply leads to its becoming part of a history of public space, insofar as “the graphic space maintains an indexical, iconic and symbolic relationship with the public space” (Quinton 2002, p. 91). The graphic gesture therefore has a collective and political dimension and is part of a long history. Its relevance and efficiency fall outside the “here and now” scope of the act of inscription.

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This point of view is particularly decisive when we enter precisely into the contemporary space of computerized media and media capitalism, in which the gesture of inscription, reading and writing is, as we have seen above, systematically instrumented, instrumentalized and standardized23. Thus, the trace does not disappear, but it becomes in a way the ghost or specter of what the ductus of the hand could have been. In “supermateriality as a decoy” associated with the fact that screens double their technological materiality from the figuration of materialities multiplying into the depths, the reading-writing device “reacts to the user’s touch by displaying a fingerprint, as if the multimedia could change the pictogram into a trace (and even a stigma)” (Jeanneret 1999, p. 255). Such a gesturalized reading (Jeanneret 2001a, p. 20) imposed by computer screens is deeply imbued with the cultural depth of gestural memories evoked by Quinton. I was able to experience this myself when, as a trainer in “multimedia writing”, I had to understand students’ difficulties in “navigating” within a cultural product then accessible on CD-ROM, the Dictionnaire Hachette multimédia published in 1995 (Jeanneret 2001b). This observation made visible and even tangible in a situation the gap between announcing a user-friendly integration of signs and the reality of the intellectual and sensory domain-knowledge required to master the operative gesture. The claim to create integrative “multimedia” had indeed been translated into text on screen by the accumulation of heterogeneous graphic traditions. In reality, in the training rooms we observed inoperative and unconsciously inoperative gestures (a misunderstanding of misunderstanding) because students attributed the ineffectiveness of their own actions to a software bug. The reason for this effect was actually that the writing involved a collection of signs from a long and heterogeneous history (Jeanneret 2001b, pp. 161–166), without the designers having measured the effects of the historical thickness of technologies of traced-out feature-making. For example, they asked users to slide a monumental granite bar down to the bottom of the screen, which users could not imagine. The “uncertain appropriations” of the heritage of several historical disciplines of what has been traced-out took shape in this erratic manipulation of signs that cannot be detached from an intimate, historically constructed relationship between gestures and devices. In this case, three disciplines of traced out featuremaking were telescoped into a temporal and spatial pile-up and collapse (Cotte and Després-Lonnet in Davallon 2012, pp. 91–121): epigraphy (inscription upon stone in public space), typography (organization by frames of the image of the text) and computer graphics (creation of illusory materialities).

23 For a detailed presentation of the categories of instrumentation (technical equipment), instrumentalization (submission to strategies) and standardization (industrial production of shapes), see Jeanneret (2014 pp. 141–178).

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Julia Bonaccorsi’s research on the phantasmagoria of the screen in the public space (Bonaccorsi 2002)24 gives historical and political significance to these gestualized readings. Indeed, it highlights the fact that the culture of gesture (physical, sensual and intellectual) is itself the subject of mediation. In the course of her research on the disciplines and values of reading (Bonaccorsi 2007), she therefore shows the figurative and normative content of these representations of coupling between the device of inscription and the graphic gesture, as described in section 3.2.2. The survey thus transforms into an object of research a finding that has so far little inspired the social sciences, which are more concerned with the multiplication of “usage studies” which are as close as possible to ordinary practices (Le Marec in Jeanneret and Ollivier 2004, pp. 141–147): “Screens are everywhere”, says Bonaccorsi, “in the hands of travellers side-byside in a subway car, in works of art and at the opera, in the back of a camera, in posters, on magazine covers, in the home and in stations, as advertising media, etc. Extremely varied and heterogeneous, these examples nevertheless intersect with individual and sensory experiences, involving bodies, places and internalized forms of the text” (Bonaccorsi 2002, p. 19). In other words, the complex to which Quinton drew our attention. The collection and analysis of the multiple media and figures of this representation – the representation of representations25 – in urban space, in our hands, in the works of artists and on the computer network, make it possible to describe in its dissemination the “publicization of a screen culture” (Bonaccorsi 2002, p. 43). These are indeed phantasmagoria of the screen – the term refers to Benjamin’s analyses of the ghostly resurgence of culture in commerce: the latter, immersed in advertising and triviality and constantly associated with metaphors of inscription and of what has been traced-out over the long term of culture, becomes “in turn machine, content, medium, social relationship” (Bonaccorsi 2002, p. 11). Bonaccorsi describes in detail the figures which “all put into tension the relationship between the medium and the inscription, the medium and the text” (Bonaccorsi 2002, p. 219). Bonaccorsi shows that this visual culture displays some aspects of writing and of image (e.g. the relationship between the tool and the gesture or the fascination of the gaze) and misses others (e.g. the social world and

24 The theoretical and methodological dimension of this research is discussed in section 4.1.3. 25 Bonaccorsi rightly uses Marin’s formula: “a metaphor of reception within the representation itself” (Marin 1994, p. 319).

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sensory existence of the writing body)26. I will limit myself, here, to what is more particularly relevant, in continuation of the previous definition of what has been traced-out (section 3.2.2), the interaction between graphic gesture and devices of inscription. Even though it is part of the continuity of the long history of a strong presence of the written word in the public space and in particular of the visual motif of the reading scene, this survey reveals the fact that the computerized media industry brings three processes into the public space that did not previously occupy such a place there: the recurring leitmotiv of the physical and material gesture of reading and manipulating the text; the omnipresence of the screen as an object and above all the fact that it combines all the statuses of tool, medium, media, text, cultural content; and the insistence on the obsessive scenography of contact between the semiotic and the operational, between “what we see and what we hold” (Bonaccorsi 2012, p. 27). For example, in advertising, the development of the computer industries has for a long time revived the ancient concern to “demonstrate and constitute use” (Bonaccorsi 2012, p. 103) and more generally affirmed the vocation to educate the consumer27. This aim has gradually intensified, with the increasingly common appearance of the “decomposed body” (Bonaccorsi 2012, p. 109), i.e. a gesture detached from its practical context in the strong sense and a fragmented body (a kind of caricature of the eye-hand couple in which Leroi-Gourhan would probably not recognize himself), all contributing to a fetishized vision of the gesture’s sole functional and abstract role. “The need for realistic scenarios and concrete contexts has diminished over thirty years. The reader’s body appears less socialized, and especially more and more partial and segmented” (Bonaccorsi 2012, p. 129). At the same time, the object itself departs from scenes linked to media and contexts, to become involved in manipulation which at the same time involves a tool, a text and information. In the “silence of the reading bodies”, the “optimal gestures for manipulation” (Bonaccorsi 2002, pp. 162 and 165) take center stage. At the same time, the interpreting body is constantly presupposed by the figure of access to culture. In short, “the rule (the measure) is exercised on bodies, through the circulation of ‘grammars’ of the gesture and semiotization of the body in the screen”. Gradually, a certain conception of the text emerges, which Bonaccorsi summarizes in these terms: “the digital text constitutes a cultural rupture (although it cannot be thought of without reference to printed culture); it can exist without a medium; it ‘gives back control’ to its reader as it can always be manipulated” (Bonaccorsi 2002, pp. 220 and 129).

26 The summary proposed here simplifies the heterogeneity and contradictions that the study of the corpus highlights in order to retain only the dominant lines. 27 On this pedagogical claim of branding discourse, see Marti (2015).

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We can, of course, wonder whether the notion of the traced-out feature still have a meaning in this universe of representations and devices where, on the one hand, handwriting tends to disappear and, on the other hand, the coupling of the hand and the eye does not trace the forms but grasps them already-made and manipulates them. The question obviously arises, and we will not cease to encounter it, because the notion of written trace cannot have the same meaning according to the way in which the body meets the medium of writing and reading. Nevertheless, it is important not to conclude too quickly that what has been traced-out has gone cold for three reasons. The first is that the encounter between the technological forms of inscription and the gesture of writing and reading remains decisive. The second is that all these phantasmagoria make the ductus of the hand disappear as an inscription on the medium, but constantly glorify it as an activation and setting in motion of the text. Finally, the trace that is erased as a design becomes central as a path28. Christian Jacob’s formula “tracing the unpredictable paths of intellectual work, in its humble and repetitive gestures as in its dazzling inventiveness” (Jacob 2002, p. 21) had already taken on new meaning in the ideal of hypertext; it becomes in a way the emblem and slogan of cultural practice in the world of platform and app archives. The creation of the smartphone application for the BNF’s Gallica text database (Jeanneret 2014, pp. 512–518) was announced with a series of posts and videos that permanently showed, in the pure line of disciplines described by Bonaccorsi, fingers making an almost magical passage into the depths of the tool, the text, the library and the culture. A computer-assisted ductus which does not constitute, for a thought of the trace, a less complex mediation than that of the engraver or calligrapher.

3.3. It has been… written At this stage of our analysis, one point is useful to note. Throughout history, writing has acquired the role of the privileged mediation of inscription, understood as the logistical dimension of writing. While in no way having a monopoly of doing so, it ensures with particular efficiency the recording of texts and social knowledge, as well as their dissemination. For this reason, the written inscription drew from this history the capacity to be intellectually conceived and technologically instrumented as the logistics par excellence for the diffusion and propagation of the specter, of what has been. Moreover, as a result, as shown by the example of personal archives discussed at the beginning of this chapter, it also plays the role of a major mediation giving access to other forms of registration of acts and social objects. This privilege of the written word is first of all due to the fact that for a long time this was the only means

28 See Garmon (2018) on the gesture of the “swipe”.

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of inscription or even registration of discourse and everything that specifically passes through language. It is also linked to the paradoxical logistical property of the written word because it is not based on the direct recording of any reality as everything written is in a way a rewriting of the world as it imposes a material discontinuity on communication and produces detachment and delinking that are particularly convenient for all those who want to collect, classify, distribute and recontextualize the traces of the social world. These logistical properties of the written word are at the heart of the computerized trace. These properties lead to a spontaneous representation of the written word as a trace, or record, which is reflected in the frequency of the expression “written trace”, which can be defined as the commonplace semiotics of writing – even though, as we have seen, scholarly discourse makes quite extensive use of it. However, a careful examination of the real observable properties of writing, and in particular its relationship with devices and gestures of inscription, highlights the fragile nature of this assimilation. On the one hand, this is because the gesture of writing and reading cannot be reduced to an operation of inscription of the already existing and, on the other hand, because this gesture itself calls for very complex conditions, situations and social representations. Finally, if writing occupies a privileged place in any device for the production and processing of traces, it is by virtue of the indexical value attributed to the process of inscription that writing allows, i.e. the particular relationships that have developed over the history of writing between the properties of the media, the functionalities of the devices and the material, physical and intellectual culture of the graphic gesture. To put it differently, this time focusing on epistemological questions that arise in research, the written trace imposes a double game on the researcher. On the one hand, to give an essential place to inscription, which conditions the deployment of the written trace as a socialized logistical reality, and on the other hand, to reintroduce the schema of the trace in its semiotic content, i.e. to ask the question of how the written object and its trace can be endowed with the properties of indexicality, with a spectral function vis-à-vis the social world. Thus reformulated, the question is more concrete but more delicate than in ichnology. On the one hand, this process can only be effectively deployed in relation to the complexity of the object and the gesture of writing, i.e. to limit itself to the main elements of complexity, which the analysis carried out so far has enabled us to identify: the material and symbolic thickness of the written inscription as what has been traced-out; the complexity of the practice of which this inscription can claim to be the index; the fact that the whole process, historically constructed and mobilizing the

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entire context of the life of signs in social life, is itself the subject of mediation – which definitively detaches the trace from the idea that it could be a simple recording and even, in the strict sense, an emanation of what it designates. If we refer at this stage to Leleu-Merviel’s analyses (2017), this transformation of the written inscription into a trace of the social world – for that is what it is – requires two complex operations: on the one hand, building a context of authentication that accredits its ability to testify to a reality; and on the other hand, determining a context of interpretation that establishes the conditions to be able to attest that it is an index of something identifiable. The reader will understand that there is no question of proposing a general model for these two operations of authentication and certification. I have chosen, here, to study two scientific undertakings that are mainly (but not exclusively) devoted to these two questions. Under the general interpretant of it has been written, we will first examine the history of the signature as the historical construction of an authenticating written sign, then the methods of analysis of drafts of writers by literary genetics, a discipline that aims to discover indices of a practice, that of literary writing, through analysis of the preparatory traces of the work. 3.3.1. Signature, a social act between identification and authentication Within his ichnological catalog of the world, Ferraris is aware of the importance of authentication. Indeed, to give a definition of what a document is, the most elaborate form of the social object (act + inscription), one of the main criteria it retains is the presence of an idiomatic element (from the Greek root which designates the unique, the individual), a vector of identification. Logically, the signature constitutes for him the archetype of the idiom, its most accomplished form, as writing was that of the trace. In the analytical deontology of his language, Ferraris thus proposes a grammar of the signature, intended to define his distinctive criteria within the world-catalog he intends to describe. For him, the signature is absolutely unique, repeatable in principle, entirely private (let us understand: personal), essentially public. This functional and normative model of what a signature must be in order to be included in his catalog corresponds roughly to most signatures common in Western industrial countries, in the form of what has been traced-out of the personal autograph. This is probably sufficient to ensure the idiomatic function of the inscription, from the typological perspective of ichnology. However, this grammar is not applicable over a long historical perspective or on all mediums. It does not refer to a social

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genesis but only to a public circulation. It suggests that the form of the inscription itself (singular, unique, repeatable) could perform the authentication function. On the other hand, beyond this standard ideal, the concrete occurrences of common personal signatures, when viewed closely, maintain a variable relationship to uniqueness, personal originality and repeatability. This functional and logical model of the signature, as just summarized, is based on an approach far removed from that adopted by Béatrice Fraenkel (1992) for the historical study of the genesis of the sign. This investigation, conducted from a semiotic and anthropological point of view over time, approaches the sign as an object gradually developed across various social fields, while focusing on the legal status of the signature, which makes it possible to understand in particular the genesis of its value. Returned to the context of the movement of its social invention, the signature does not appear as a collection of historical avatars of the same function. Its identity in itself is historical, as it has gradually emerged from two major series of signs: identity signs and validation signs, which were not naturally intended to merge into a single inscription. In addition, if a form linked to the individual gesture of the trace (the signature-ductus in Fraenkel’s terms) and making it the trace of a body and an engagement is today the everyday format of these functions, it follows an infinite range of technical and symbolic innovations: coats of arms, seings, seals, badges, flourishes, monograms, etc. To underline the thickness of this historical construction, which cannot be reduced to a single function or linear development, we can recall that the oldest signs of identity were not individual but collective. The modern autograph signature, which ensures a new presence of gestural traces, in the physical sense of the term (the pen has indeed introduced a diaphoria onto the paper), extends a long tradition of rituals of the body of which “signing oneself” constitutes the paragon. Similarly, the complexity of what is traced-out of the flourish and its uncertain readability, which are indeed the visible foundation of the “cryptic function” of the signature, inherit their principle of medieval “subscription”, whose administrative function was quite different and whose format was not limited to the traced-out feature of the name. The study of the modern signature, which follows a millennium of various signs of identity involving more or less directly the body and objects, highlights the fact that authentication of the sign is based on the complexity of material and physical mediations that we were able to identify above, without in any way reducing itself to it. “The modern signature can be considered as an imprint of the signatory’s body. It is a kinetic print, recording a way of tracing, more or less quickly, more or less supported, and a way of distorting letters” (Fraenkel 2008, p. 20). This sign inscribed on a medium is from the outset a complex object whose thickness is inseparable from the historical elaboration of a culture of the body, meaning and

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institution. This is why, if we can verify from reading Béatrice Fraenkel’s texts that Ferraris borrowed from them the great functions she identifies, these take on, in a historical study, a much greater scope and thickness than in the ichnological grammar: “The signature is a remarkable sign that combines the function of a proper name (it designates an individual), the strength of an act of language (signing is doing), the presence effect of the index, it emanates from the signatory’s body (it is an autograph), and the graphic strength of an image (it is a form in which I show myself). This density of the sign corresponds to a long history” (Fraenkel and Pontille 2006, p. 104). The four functions are similar, but the categories of form, effect, presence and index give them a different semiotic and social thickness. It is through this heterogeneous technosemiotic complexity that the signature embodies the trace schema. However, not only that. The signature “is presented as an act taken within a broader action. It involves several actors, several authors, several hands. Its distributed performativity refers to the long history of the sign, to the […] multiple signs of validation” (Fraenkel 2008, p. 23). The sign evokes an act, a presence, a gesture, but passes through a chain of inscriptions and actors. Under these conditions, the continuity of trust in the indexicality of the sign is both supported and jeopardized by the objects and functions that are necessary for it, with the consequence that the signature is also, or first and foremost, an issue of power. For Fraenkel, therefore, the signature refers to the conditions under which the written document can perform an act – and not just to proceed to the inscription of an act – in its own performativity. This also explains why, in this theoretical framework, in which the function of authenticating the sign is not limited to the inscription of a trace or the recording of a deed, the expression “electronic signature” needs to be kept at a distance, because it masks violent changes in mediation and, therefore, the powers of writing (Fraenkel and Pontille 2006). In reality, what is commonly referred to as an “electronic signature” is a quite different object from the autograph signature, which claims to perform the same functions, but probably for the benefit of other actors. And, like the modern signature, the socalled “electronic signature”, the flagship of encryption technologies, must be replaced in a complex and heterogeneous series of signs of identity and authenticity. Limiting ourselves at this stage of the reflection to what the autograph signature teaches us about the written trace, we can say that it is well defined as a process of inscription that takes advantage of the dimension of physical engagement in a traced-out feature on a medium, but its current history mobilizes a considerable panoply of devices of inscription, material forms, gestures, actors, values: more generally a particularly complex, discontinuous and opaque modus operandi. It is

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undoubtedly the very definition of the signature to be endowed with the value of a trace (in the indexical sense of the term), particularly in the political and legal fields, but it is at the cost of a set of interpretative gestures and using conceptions of the ways in which all these objects, signs and practices are supposed to produce the social world. 3.3.2. Genetic criticism in the context of the trace/traced-out couple Genetic criticism is a current of literary studies that has been structured and institutionalized over the past three decades around a practice that was more or less spontaneous until then, the interpretation of writers’ “drafts” as the “sources” of published works29. The development of the genetics of texts interests us here for two main reasons. On the one hand, this discipline explicitly formulates the project of processing written traces (a term used by many authors of the movement, with various meanings) as indices of a particular, particularly complex and valuable, practice, that of literary writing. On the other hand, this work has the merit of being based on an extremely attentive and precise examination of the visual, formal and strictly graphic dimension of the written word – and, therefore, in the terms adopted here, of traced-out features considered both as a form to be interpreted and as a manifestation of a gesture – which is not the case with other trends in the human sciences which also define the written word as an index (such as the sociology of actors). This is why this theoretical and methodological undertaking, addressed in its main lines of action, can make a valuable contribution to the critical analysis of the conditions for transforming written inscriptions into traces. However, I would like to point out that, since I am neither an actor nor a specialist in this field, I do not intend to propose a history and even less a criticism of the research carried out under the general name of genetics. It is likely that none of the proposals I will seek to identify in some programmatic texts would be unanimously accepted by researchers claiming to be genetic. This is both because theoretical positions are diverse and because the community of geneticists continues to think critically about its own concepts and methods. As an external observer of this research, I will rely here on a series of texts 29 The latest developments in genetics have largely moved away from literary objects, for example, to non-public documents in the field of science, media and ordinary writing (Biasi 2011). Within the framework of the reflection proposed here, only research developed on authors’ documents will be taken into account, an object which the same author has dealt with in another, separate book (Biasi 2000) despite the homonymy of the titles. Indeed, the extension of genetics to a very wide range of objects, some of which are not written, exceeds the limits of this work. However, I will confine myself, here, to the work on handwritten preparatory texts, without engaging in the genetics of digital pre-texts or, above all, the very important research on the editorial genetics of published works.

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that offer a synthetic reading of the genetic adventure and explain its aims and problems; in particular Lebrave (1994); Hay (1994, 1996); Rey (1996); Biaisi (2000); Grésillon (2008, 2016). This reading of the genetic project, which is intended to be comprehensive and instructive for reflection on how writings become indices of practice, only captures some of the complex questions raised by researchers in this field. It focuses on four aspects of this production: the role played by the schema of the written trace in this intellectual enterprise; the contribution of the critical distance of researchers to the analysis of this schema as it unfolds more or less spontaneously in the social sphere; the conceptual network put into action to constitute the inscription as indices, and the graphic traced-out feature; and the methodological questions encountered by the enterprise of social knowledge, as formulated by its actors. All the authors who describe the genetic enterprise mobilize the trace schema in its three major components, as identified in Chapter 2: the temporal schema of the it has been, the visual presence of signs of the real and the promise of indexical domain knowledge about it. The operations they describe aim to introduce temporality into the spatiality of documents, whether in terms of their own graphic space or in terms of their collection, conservation and deployment. The temporal schema of the it has been is consubstantial with the very idea of textual genetics, since it is a question, by taking the corpora of preparatory texts as a basis for investigation into the elaboration of the works, of exploiting in documents of the present the signs of a past of writing, of projecting a past temporal process onto a present spatial object. On the other hand, the interpretation of graphic signs is indeed performed under the principle of causality, insofar as they are considered as evidence of a practice and a purpose, that of the writing project. This is the hypothesis that structures the material substrate of the research, the genetic record, i.e. a chronological and logical edition of the collection of texts based on a set of hypotheses – assumed as such – on how the “states of the text” can testify to an elaboration. The fact that the indices are those of a particularly rich practice (and not, for example, a simple situation) confers a complex and paradoxical character to the temporal scheme of the it has been written. As a present vestige of a practice that by definition is in becoming, the writing of a work, the inscription-index is also oriented towards the future. Governed not only by an efficient cause but also by a final cause, it was something that would become a work of art. Thus, the quest for a current presence of this potential haunts this enterprise, which seeks to access writing as the “central stage in a creative process – one in which the mind grasps the instruments that allow it to express itself in the time of writing and the space of the page, and one in which operations materialize into observable inscriptions” (Hay 1994, p. 19).

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Presenting genetics in general, Pierre-Marc de Biasi perfectly summarizes the schema of the trace in the same sense we described through its components: “Genetic criticism has focused on this temporal dimension of becoming-text, assuming that the work, in its final perfection, remains the effect of its metamorphoses and contains the memory of its own genesis. But in order to become the object of a study, this genesis of the work must have left ‘traces’. It is these material indices that textual genetics aims to find and understand” (Biasi 2000, p. 9). This primacy of the indexical reading of written objects is not of a fortuitous or secondary nature for this scientific movement. It is based on assumptions which have the value of explicitly challenging the dominant tradition of literary exegesis. The latter is accused either of confining itself to finished works or of explaining them by studying their sources and influences, which is subject to a double criticism: as seeking their meaning outside the writings, and not conducting a real empirical investigation into the creative process. The search for the trace thus operates within the written objects studied and the indexical turn of research is expressed by the procedures that make it possible to make the multiple preparatory states of the text and parallel writings the indices of a creative movement whose process the research claims to reconstruct. This leads many authors to a stronger claim, that of liquidating an ideology of the work in favor of a thought of writing in action. This is not without an axiological charge that gives a polemical turn to several texts in which oppositions are seen at work such as fixity/movement, text/writing, closure/opening, death/life. This is what Louis Hay, one of the main founders of this research enterprise, calls a “semiotics of movement” (Hay 1996). These assumptions lead to a redefinition of the act of writing and the text that continue to give a maverick air to the genetic project, even as firmly institutionalized as it is today. The methodical part of the project is coupled with an ideological part, which consists of opposing two definitions of the text: on the one hand, the text as a closed and fixed object, which would be the formal embodiment of a cultural practice and a symbolic economy against which genetics militates; on the other hand, a marginalization of the finished and edited text in the service of emergence, uncertainty, the elusive, even the “word” or the “gesture”. The recognition of successive states of the text as indices of a process which encompasses them aims at a theory of writing as a practice, which the corpus of pre-texts are supposed to be able to make visible. Nevertheless, what is valuable for us is that the schema of the trace does not unfold in this case as a more or less improvised social form, but within the framework of an explicit scientific discussion. From the outset, genetics was haunted by two fantasies, which its opponents did not fail to criticize (Hay 1994).

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The first consists of the hope of putting one’s finger on the act of creation which, captured through traces, remains inaccessible to any method whatsoever, since what the drafts offer us is a possible presentification of the gestures and not their presence, forever vanished. The second dream, even more dangerous, would be a quest for the origin of the work, which the investigation of its successive states may stimulate in the passionate researcher. The reflexive and controversial nature of the research means that geneticists very early on identified, formulated and criticized these two illusions. They had to “abandon the idea of ‘reading into souls’, of reliving the writer’s inner experience”, in order to “give themselves an autonomous critical position: [focusing] on writing processes in the reality of their execution, in the attestation of a scriptural trace” (Hay 1994, p. 19): which, as we will see, leads to the discovery of a considerable number of problems which are usually masked by careless use of the notion of the trace. Indeed, the concept of pre-text is an intellectual construct. These are regulated procedures that are capable of conferring status on an object that did not have one as a “draft” in the tradition of literary studies, where, as a product of a non-noble reality, work, it was most often “only the residual trace of that work [which] is to be forgotten” (Biasi 2000, p. 15). As a result of this, the indexical project meets the two requirements that qualify the trace according to Leleu-Merviel (2017): on the one hand, the interpretation of these documents based on stated explanatory principles, and on the other, the validation of their authentication, not only as real documents but also, and especially, as traces of gestures. These operations, which constitute the scientific nature of the approach, are clearly based on the fact that writing takes the form of observable inscriptions on a medium; but a reading of the analyses produced by researchers on this or that file of preparatory texts shows that this method cannot result from the sole consideration of writing as an inscription: it cannot avoid studying it above all as a traced-out feature. It is a certain interpretation of the traced-out feature as what has been traced-out (and, therefore, as a distinct written inscription of a single recording and as a readable symbolic form) that allows the researcher to qualify a particular written production as a trace of a writing practice. The first consequence of these methodological requirements is that the trace schema cannot be used in literary studies as it usually is in the social life of industrial media. Its scientific analysis requires that it be denaturalized: “The pre-text, does not designate the materiality of the manuscripts, but their critical redeployment as the geneticist can reconstruct it by following the chronology of the operations of conception and writing of the work. It is an entity that does not exist outside the scientific gesture which constitutes it” (Biasi 2000, p. 31)30. 30 See section 4.1 for an analysis of the consequences of this presumption in relation to Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas.

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Biasi explains that the finalist schema – the interpretation of traces as signs of an object under construction and therefore the reading of each piece of writing from what it is destined to become – cannot be totally abandoned, however fragile it may be, because it is the very basis for the construction of the file of fragments, the starting point for research, just as the genetic editing of texts is its conclusion. The lexicologist Alain Rey gives a radical version of this teleological reading, which certainly would not be accepted by all geneticists, but which has the merit of being explicit for us: “The indexical charge of the manuscript increases with the material traces constituting deviations from the virtual printed page – this future of the text” (Rey 1996, p. 21). Pushed to its logical conclusion, the temporal schema that makes this or that draft a sign that the work was before becoming itself leads to qualifying it as a prefiguration of what will be. In the methods of collecting and organizing corpora, “the drafts will all be considered in their relationship to the final manuscript, according to a teleological principle: the final manuscript of the text will be conceived as ‘purpose’ or ‘finality’ (telos) of the drafts, as if the drafting were directed by the final result” (Biasi 2000, p. 60). We can say, by parodying Bakhtin, that the materiality of the object defined as a pre-text constitutes a kind of chronotope (space–time) of the living writing, presentified in the state of the written objects constructed by the researchers – and the different technicians of the graphic, documentary and editorial processing of these objects. Genetic research is, therefore, deployed in the space between a project of considerable ambition, making scientific the schema of the trace, and thus in a way presentifying the act of writing, and the inevitable challenges to this project from the requirements of regulated interpretation of the texts. Initially, it involves: “[…] rediscovering the text of the work through the succession of sketches and essays that gave it birth and led it to its final form. For what purpose? To better understand the work: to know from the inside its composition, the writer’s hidden intentions, their processes, the way they invent” (Biasi 2000, p. 7). This is undoubtedly the most hyperbolic formulation of the indexical project. That is exactly – Biasi is clear on this point – the aim of the geneticists. In reality, what they do is deploy an interpretation that is as regulated as possible and always subjective, and accepted as such, of written objects. In short, the genetics of pre-texts is the exercise of a certain type of semiotic predilection31, which considers written objects as clues to a writing practice while imposing on itself the 31 For a detailed presentation of this concept, see Souchier, Jeanneret and Le Marec (2003, pp. 129–148). Semiotic predilection is the subjective part of the relationship to the text, translated by stances and choices, partially unconscious, within the signs which affords a medium.

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constraint of materially justifying this interpretation. Reading the theoretical and methodological texts, we can distinguish, for the sake of simplicity, three levels of exercising this preferred activity: constituting texts as traced-out features; defining the interpretative categories that confer on them the status of indices and mobilizing conceptions of what a writing practice is. We can quickly consider these three moments of the method. I would like to point out that marking the place of subjectivity at work in the relationship to the written trace has no critical value at all, because the scientific study of the written word as an index of a practice cannot avoid implementing and discussing them. The objectification of these procedures has the advantage, here, of capturing them in an approach that makes them particularly visible. Genetics, the project of grasping a writing practice from its written traces, necessarily encounters on its way the thickness of what has been traced-out (tracé) as the material mode of existence of writing. Genetics works on corpora of objects that particularly demonstrate the complexity of what can be traced in the literary worlds. The documents it studies constitute a “whole that is dense, unpredictable, heterogeneous, enigmatic, surprising and often difficult to decipher” (Biasi 2000, p. 16). Taking into account the medium, the visual organization of signs, the complexity of socialized codes or, on the contrary, those peculiar to such and such a writer, confronts the genetic project with the complexity of mediations of the writing gesture, as mentioned in section 3.2 and more generally with the fact that the graphic inscription, if it suggests its status as a trace, remains an opaque and dense object. The choice to constitute the pre-text as a draft necessarily introduces a tension into the process in order to grasp it as it requires understanding each writing as the moment of a process and not as an object in itself, and, therefore, to inscribe it, explicitly, in a program of activity; but it leads to recognizing its materiality and its formal structure, and, therefore, to constitute it fully as a text, a text whose reading would be, not like that of a speech, but like that of a collection of indices. However here is the paradox that is constantly manifested by controversies over the interpretation of an author’s manuscripts: the written inscription cannot be constituted as an index of a writing in progress (in the past) without first being grasped (in its current presence) as what has been traced-out and as a text. Geneticists have developed the habit of opposing the text to the pre-text, in a polemical relationship to the sacralization of the literary text. By using the term “text” here to refer to drafts and preparatory notes, I thus distinguish myself from most authors of genetic studies. They want to distinguish the objects they analyze from the category of the text. In reality, the concept of text that they wish to distance themselves from is the one that is linked to the literary ideology of the work and the author: the one that Barthes described as an “irrefutable, indelible trace, it is thought, of the meaning that the author of the work intentionally deposited there” (Barthes 2002, IV, p. 443). The technical dimension of genetics is difficult to dissociate from

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this position on what literature is, which is also that of an intellectual moment. As Almuth Grésillon writes in the introduction to the latest edition of his book on genetics: “[…] to literature understood as a closed set of canonical texts, which have become such, thanks to processes of reception, is added the open set of the processes of writing . Open to the possible, the multiple, the ambivalent, even the unfeasible, genetic criticism is also a way of thinking about literature in the intellectual categories of our time” (Grésillon 2016, p. 12). Nevertheless, from the point of view of the semiotics of writing, a draft is indeed a text: a material object, written on a medium, interpretable based on a culture of forms, implementing a set of more or less conventional codes, whose visual organization contributes to the meaning. This is why genetics not only traverses the documents it mobilizes in order to find out what they reveal, but leads to a theory of the draft as a text to be read, of sketches and erasures as signs of writing. They are written objects that have their own structure and are, therefore, particularly difficult to describe. The temporalities to which they may testify are superimposed and deployed in the material distribution of the media and on the space of each of them. It is possible, as Biasi (2000, pp. 54–58) does, to advance typologies linking a form and a writing operation (deletion, modification, addition) but everything shows that these hypotheses are very complex to validate. It can even be argued that the genetic enterprise has resulted in two different and largely contradictory achievements: on the one hand, the requalification of literature as a practice of writing against its definition as a corpus of texts; on the other hand, the full recognition of the textuality of written objects that were once called drafts. Above all, and most importantly, the dialectic between traced-out features (tracé) and trace concerns the very heart of the genetic enterprise. Nothing can make a trace – in the indexical sense of the term – of the inscription – in the sense of what has been traced-out – without the mediation of the whole semiotic, personal and social thickness of the gesture of writing, and even of conservation, collection and classification of objects. To claim to find indices of writing within the written, it is necessary to go through the social mediations of document management, the technological thickness of writing tools (paper, ink, notebook, etc.), the author’s little documentary disciplines as a socialized as well as singular individual, the visual forms of preparatory writing. The inscriptions left on the media by the activity of writing and its collective and individual disciplines are hypercomplex objects. Their qualification as traces presupposes that they are inhabited by the current presentification of the past gesture, but they need to be rewritten to become readable as marks of a gesture. All the theorists of genetic knowledge insist on the time of domestication which is necessary to be able, starting from signs present on a

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medium, to formulate hypotheses on the work of a writer. The highly interpretative nature of the index, which we have encountered in section 2.1, is doubled, here, because to define the object to be interpreted itself, it is necessary to go through all the complexity of written forms. The controversies surrounding the interpretation of drafts make visible the work of analyzing the traced-out features present on the manuscripts and the complexity of the visual and linguistic codes they use. The most elementary gestures such as the temporal ordering of what has been traced-out on the same medium or the identification of their operative value require a detailed analysis of the visual and material forms of the text and the processing of these forms according to schemas of interpretation; and it is this reading of the image of the text (Souchier 1998) which, alone, allows the qualification of traced-out features as traces of a writing practice. Biasi gives us a very simple example of this problem. On the basis of his assiduous frequentation of Flaubert’s draft corpus, he criticizes René Dumesnil, publisher of Les trois contes, for his interpretation of the signs present in the preparatory manuscripts (Biasi 2000, pp. 62–63). He interpreted pages cancelled by a large cross as the abandonment of a version by the writer, concluding that the drafts were indecipherable and confusing, while a greater familiarity with Flaubert’s writing practices allows Biasi to establish what he calls “erasures of use”: the writer has become accustomed to managing his writing tasks by erasing the passages of his texts that are completed and devoted himself to the next passage. Such a controversy, on which we will refrain from commenting, highlights the mediation dimension of what has been traced-out and the extreme complexity of the interpretation of the writing process and its phases, based on the materiality of a collection of writings and a set of signs co-present in the same space (Biasi 2000, pp. 32–49). It is one example among others of the social and individual depth of the “universe of erasure” and its possible grammars. No statement on the direct link between identifying the format of a traced-out feature and its qualification as a trace of an activity can be envisaged without the use of a whole universe of interpreters of the written form and the uses of the written word. Another situation that dramatically demonstrates the complexity of these mediations of the written trace as an index is the intervention of computer mediation in genetic research (Lebrave 1994). The most obvious consequence of this change in medium is that it calls into question the empirical reality of the inscription and what has been traced-out, insofar as writing on the screen causes not a disappearance, but a multiplication of the media of the writing (Souchier 1996). In this context, the distinction between pre-text and text loses its meaning. It would take an entire book to study this question precisely. What interests us in the immediate future is that the use of computers requires an effort to explain the interpretative categories of texts that reveal the intellectual operations of documentary processing. Indexical

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reasoning cannot be assumed; it must be formulated. Indeed, in computing, any processing of an object, whether it be an image, a text or a sound, requires explicit descriptors (Cotte 2004; Pédauque 2006). The gesture of editorial enunciation, which in the printed form mobilizes an implicit exegesis of the text (Souchier 1997, p. 159), requires, here, a scriptural and logical explanation of the status conferred on the various documents. For this reason, the creation of a genesis file or the genetic editing of a text on a computer medium (known as “digital”) is radically different from the material collection of handwritten texts or from their “digitization” into an image format (Després-Lonnet 2014). The technicians who have had to make this type of device and who have wished – and this is not always the case – to do so by measuring their responsibility have developed a reflection that interests us particularly because it involves a very close discussion of the concepts we have encountered so far, such as inscription, traced-out features and trace. Due to the challenges of their work, they cannot be satisfied with the idea that digital publishing of manuscripts would be a simple provision of material files. For example, Aurèle Crasson (2010), research engineer in the textual genetics team ITEM-CNRS, provided an accurate analysis of the decisions involved in creating a digital edition of the states of the text as part of the international format of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). This highlights the fact that the properties of computing allow for the manipulation and processing of enriched corpora, as well as a wider circulation. This underlines the fact that these devices transform texts and, therefore, give new responsibilities to the technicians who publish them. This analysis is in line with that of Després-Lonnet (2000) as to the fact that documentary processing requires textual explanation of ways of doing things which were acquired in an integrated way. The “coding” of texts required by the TEI, as an internationally standardized editing protocol, leads to three types of transformations upon documents collected in physical archives that constitute rewriting of the manuscript in an artificial coding. First, it is necessary to translate the visual and material traced-out features, in their spatiality and sensual dimension, into transcriptions made of strings and tags. Second, it is necessary to qualify the translated textual elements by assigning them a temporality and a place in the writing process. Finally, it is necessary to know what to read, because the document produced is intended to allow researchers to conduct this reading. It is indeed a question of “producing a document that is comprehensible, transmissible and above all shareable for a community of researchers” (Crasson 2010, p. 46), which is the definition of the communicative content of the trace. This communication problem is well known to ICS researchers who analyze the work of documentalists. This is the very complex semiotic of the gesture of indexation and the mobilization of documentary languages: a gesture that presents a paradoxical character, because the professional who produces a description of the documents must anticipate possible

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readings, which leads in fact to producing interpretations, without however completing them or closing them (Curves in Metzger 2003, pp. 159–170). The digital editor’s work of explanation advances along the path that this interpretation-mediation must follow, a process that highlights the difficulty of decision-making for a simple indexical reading of the documents. The reading of the traced-out features as a trace, based on an agreement between researchers that validates its status as “accredited, coherent and believable” (Leleu-Merviel 2018, p. 185), is the very basis of the work of coding: “A crossed-out word is writing upon which a traced-out graphic is superimposed that we commonly call ‘erasure’, ‘strikethrough’, ‘cancellation’ or other less commonly used synonyms. Everyone agrees that this graphic trace is the mark of an erasure, a deletion that may or may not give rise to reconsideration” (Crasson 2010, pp. 45–46). The implementation of coding shows to what extent each mobilization of the notions of inscription, tracedout feature, trace and index pose complex problems of interpretation. If it is based above all on observables, the definition of a “typing” (the qualification of a textual sequence) must constantly resort to hypotheses about operations that have not given rise to inscription, to writing the unwritten and to ordering the inscriptions within the framework of a scenario of action of which no one really knows what it is, because time only materializes in space and gesture in form. For this reason, I would like to quote at some length an extract from this particularly lucid analysis: “What can be said of an insertion if only at first sight […] is it first and foremost a mark of rupture in the flow of scriptural linearity of a text and a mark of expansion? If the crossing-out line is in ninety-nine percent of cases the indisputable trace of a word that the writer has for the time being abandoned, there are not always such graphically relevant traces for insertion. Because everything can be added, each word that is written one on top of the other can be considered as the word that replaces another and that we would tend to reduce to a substitution. These two operations, which seem self-evident when the chronological and scriptural process is observed in a manuscript, are in reality extremely difficult to describe. Different entry levels into these concepts are required: those that are trace-based (e. g., the strikethrough line for deletion or the graphic sign for insertion of an interlinear addition) and those that are quality-based” (Crasson 2010, p. 46). In the terms I have adopted for this book, “trace” refers, here, to the observable inscription and “quality” to the indexical interpretation of this inscription: reflective analysis shows that there is no obvious or automatic link between the two concepts. The editor’s awareness of the complexity and importance of her operational decisions is reflected in the intense work to which she submits the term “trace”, used eight times in the two pages of this article devoted to coding: a range of uses that

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allows her both to distinguish the gesture that gives rise to inscription from that which can only be assumed, to designate the material form that comes to be inscribed upon the medium and the written object that we know how to interpret as an index, thus traversing the entire spectrum of what we have encountered so far under the name of written trace. The effort to tackle this complexity rigorously also finds its expression in the use of the term “mark”, which has not been widely used so far in discussion of the trace. This term entails a certain methodological caution: it is located in terms of the observation of an irregularity, a diaphoria in LeleuMerviel’s sense, and makes it possible, by distinguishing the observable traced-out from the supposed index, to make questionable all the decisions that constitute a trace as a written object. Eliseo Verón insisted, in her Social Semiosis, on the importance of the distinction between mark and trace, the same one that the editor of pre-texts mobilizes here. Recalling that the production of meaning is only observed in the objects that bear it, the semiotician analyzes in this book the activity that consists – that which geneticists do – of “restoring underlying operations from marks inscribed in the material surface”. It then establishes a principle of distinction between mark and trace: “Marks can be said to be significant properties whose relationship either to the conditions of production or to the conditions of recognition is not specified […] When the relationship between the significant property and its conditions (either of production or of recognition) is established, these marks become traces of either set of conditions” (Verón 1986, p. 125). In fact, as we see in Crasson’s article, this principle is as essential to state as it is difficult to implement and we have not finished discussing the uncertain relationship between observable marks and inferred traces. If these categories are so difficult to mobilize – if the adjustment between inscription, graphic traced-out features and written trace is so delicate – it is finally for another, essential reason, which is by no means specific to the written object but which concerns media texts, whatever they may be – which is why this question will occupy the entire next chapter of this book. To establish an objective or at least argued description of the value of a written text as an index of writing practice, a definition of what writing is should be available. This explains why, beyond the sharing of more or less common methods of establishing dossiers for collecting and editing pre-text corpora, textual genetics presents itself as an immense field of controversy on the conceptions of writing, programmatic or improvised, charged with various aesthetic, pragmatic and poetic layers, more or less conscious. It is all this theoretical and ideological background that the slightest gesture of coding a text as a moment of an activity calls for. A difficulty – probably an aporia – that we will choose, here, to leave to the genetic specialists.

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Nevertheless, we can conclude something useful from this impossibility of closing the indexicality of the text and definitively separating the trace from the mark. The world of writing draws our attention to the fact that the indexical qualification of objects as traces of a gesture or practice depends very much on the nature of the practices concerned. Although determining the meaning of a footprint on sand (section 2.1) or the meaning of a statue’s patina (section 1.1) requires an interpretive activity, it is not of the same magnitude as interpreting a traced-out graphic on a manuscript, because writing is one of the most complex practices in human culture and the link between the shape of a traced-out feature, the nature of a gesture and the meaning of a practice is particularly complex to establish. We must retain this conclusion, because it sheds light on the stakes of the claim of industrial actors to make any circulating inscription, however limited it may be, an indication of a cultural and social practice, however complex it may be. This leads to an efficiency without relevance. In the immediate future, this detour through signature and draft leads us, on the basis that the objects created by the gestures of writing and reading are not only collections of traces but also texts, to approach the nature of the transformation imposed on texts by those who want at all costs to make them into traces. 3.4. The written trace as an institutional fact We have been able to identify three modes of existence of the written trace based respectively on the logistical power of the inscription, the semiotic thickness of the trace and the indexical interpretation of written productions. We owe these clarifications to the fact that certain research specifically explains each of these three particular embodiments of the trace schema. Remaining with this typology might nevertheless suggest, which is not true, that the inventory of the structural functions of the written word is sufficient to arm us conceptually to understand the genesis and power of the written trace. All these theories concern a historical object, which has only developed as a function of the creation of stances, categories of analysis, material devices, social knowledge, professions and economies of the written trace. This had to be invested with its status of trace, as we have already seen about the signature. What is at issue is the place of the historicity of the trace. To explore it, we will consider three modes of institution of the written trace as a legitimate social object, among many others possible: as a scientific assumption, as a political device and as an educational mediation. It is a question of observing the way in which the written trace can acquire a status within scientific institutions, in the management of the social world and in the pedagogical relationship, by taking advantage, as we have done so far, of a close reading of texts that elaborate upon these questions more

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particularly. This may allow us to denaturalize fully the conception of writing as a trace, to observe the role that devices of trace production and collection can play in social control and to understand why the written trace has become a mediation valued by education science and policy. 3.4.1. The written trace, a scientific assumption The authors we have considered so far all base their approach to writing on its character as a trace, with more or less nuance. We have chosen them here as a resource for understanding the social, media and political deployment of trace production devices, which play a major role in current conceptions of the social world. For the same reason, it is important to know that this is an intellectual bias, because there is nothing natural about thinking of writing as a trace. The history of the debates, which have developed over the past half century within the scientific community studying writing, provides us with valuable information in this regard. Some authors give a less central and more limited role to writing as a trace, sometimes even challenging the very idea of a written traces, and it is interesting to understand why this is so. Of course, since the purpose of these reminders is to denature the notion of written trace and not to give an account of theories of writing, the reader will have to accept the schematic way in which these theories will be evoked. The notion of trace occupies a more modest place among theorists who work to theorize writing as a system of meaning and particular communication than among those who conceive of it on the basis of broader social and cultural issues. Among theorists such as Sylvain Auroux (1984), Roy Harris (1994), Jean-Marie Klinkenberg (1996) or Jack Goody (1979) – to whom I will limit myself here – the use of the term trace itself is not frequent. The essential thing is that among these authors the logistical content of writing as an inscription and its indexical value as a testimony of an it has been are never denied, nor placed at the center of the investigation into the history and forces of writing. This phenomenon is explained by the way they construct the very concept of writing. For Sylvain Auroux, historian of language sciences, the invention of different writing systems is part of a broader process that he calls grammatization, i.e. the contribution of writing techniques to the development of language: the term refers to the inventions of writing, grammar and computer science, which this author presents as technical stages in the development of language. For Auroux, if grammarians and then linguists worked hard to describe language as we speak it, they could only do so because the systems of visual representation of language and its materialization in external objects made it possible to organize, classify, describe linguistic entities and their functioning. In such a context, the fact that writing allows the inscription and

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spatial deployment of language, in particular its representation and manipulation, is decisive. However, this point of view leads to a most violent criticism of Derrida’s grammatology, described as “pseudo-science” (Auroux 1984, pp. 160–161) insofar as the theory extends, as we have seen above, the category of writing to include all forms of communication, making indistinguishable what characterizes it as a technological and symbolic system. For Auroux, writing is, therefore, not only or fundamentally a trace, but a structured organization of thought that cannot be cut off from language as a meaningful and articulated activity. For this author, the mediation of language is a necessary feature of writing. This intervenes in the human process of symbolization as a moment and a particular resource. If we reduce writing to the notion of trace, we miss the essential part of its nature, as a way of existence and the improvement of the strictly human function of language. If Auroux fully shares the criticism of logocentrism, i.e. the reduction of writing to a pale ghost of the oral, he draws conclusions contrary to those of Derrida. According to Auroux, in all coherence, this logically leads to making writing something other than the trace of speech or action: a particular form of language that far exceeds the mere gesture of inscription: “We must see in the writing process, what can be called scripturalization, one of the first degrees of speech formation… Where logocentrism sees a disaster, we must perceive the origin of scientific thought and language sciences” (Auroux 1984, p. 162). The historian-linguist is undoubtedly, among the theorists of writing, the one who is most devoted to language – which distinguishes him from the authors who follow – but he takes a stance that is shared by almost all the theorists of writing, beyond their disagreements: to grant more interest to what writing allows and foments in itself than to what exists outside it and of which it may bear a trace. Jean-Marie Klinkenberg shares with Auroux the desire not to deny the privileged link between writing and language. For the semiotician who develops an approach that is attentive to the essential features of a general rhetoric that crosses different systems of meaning (Group μ 1982) as well as to the specificity of each sign, medium, and mode of expression, it is necessary to avoid two symmetrical errors: on the one hand, to reduce writing to the sole role of transcribing and representing language; on the other hand, to extend its unlimited definition to any form of expression. The observation made above on ichnology is in line with his analysis: “In the end as we see in Derrida, the broad conception tends to absorb all semiotics – or at least all spatial semiotics – into the concept of writing. It is hard to see what is gained by such a headlong rush” (Klinkenberg 2005, pp. 162–163). In his eclectic and reasoned approach, writing must, therefore, be recognized as having two types of distinct and related functions, which he calls respectively “glossics”

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and “grammatological”. The former are linked to the very diversified way in which ideograms and alphabets represent language, and the latter to the means specific to writing as an image for achieving communication that owes nothing to spoken language and which defines its particular power of expression and communication. What I have described above as the logistics of inscription is obviously at work in grammatological functions, but these are far from being limited to the latter. They take advantage of all the evocative and cognitive powers of the visual sign. It is for this reason that they allow particular forms of thought and a specific organization of communication. We are, therefore, at the furthest from the indistinction of inscriptions and Ur-writing. In addition, to the fact that writing performs symbolic functions (as observed, for example, in typography) and does not play the sole role of an index, Klinkenberg considers it necessary to deconstruct the naïve notion of an index as a sign of a causal link (see section 2.1). For the sake of clarity, he therefore distinguishes two very different types of signs, which he calls “indice” and “index” respectively. This choice is linked to the fact that the French word “indice” has taken on a much narrower meaning than the English word “index”. This allows him not to reduce writing to its function of trace, but to emphasize the role it plays in focusing attention and giving status to objects: what Klinkenberg calls his indexical function. This distinction between indice and index is not a simple technical argument. It changes the status given to the written sign which, not only represents the world, but also becomes an organizer of the process of communication and meaning itself. In fact, the index, which attracts attention, highlights certain signs, links them to a context, helps to create situations and stances in communication: “In indexical functions as they appear in writing the graphic sign is a sign that must be known (through a conventional rule) to refer in a certain way to a given object, contiguous to that sign. For example: names on shop windows, titles of books or pictorial works, signs which name buildings, classrooms or conference rooms, badges of staff or participants in a conference, names of television presenters appearing at the bottom of the screen, labels on cans, names of the deceased on graves” (Klinkenberg 2005, p. 188). We can see the importance of this function in traceability, and what has been called somewhat hastily an economy of attention. For Klinkenberg, writing is indeed a constituent element of the social world, but it is less so in that it registers a social act as an inscription (according to the formula of Ferraris) than in that it organizes as

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a system of signs the conditions for a productive communicative activity of the social world32. The anthropology of writing proposed by Jack Goody (1979) shares with Klinkenberg’s semiotics the rejection of logocentrism and the desire to recognize writing as a particular creative value for communication and thought. However, the foundations and purpose of this research show, compared to semiotic theories, an originality that is interesting for a critical analysis of the notion of written trace. Goody encountered the question of the relationship between oral and written language while investigating the respective cultural resources of societies with writing and those based on oral language. It was after having personally experienced, and then observed in different regions of the world, life without writing (Goody 2004; Jeanneret 2011, pp. 83–98) that he produced a theory of graphic reason – the cognitive resources of writing – based on the identification of structures absent in the oral and specific to the written word. Without in any way idealizing written civilization or the intellectual power of the literate worlds, Goody is interested in writing as a tool for thinking and representing the world, generating cultural productions, social relations and power relations. He pays particular attention to the way in which written forms, in their materiality and visuality, equip and support particular acts of culture, different from those permitted by speech alone. To take just one example, reciting a sequence of words is very different for him from writing a list on a medium and having it in front of him: enumeration is a semiotic object different from the list. Echoing Plato, Goody noticed above all that the written list empties the memory and frees the mind for other activities. However, it is even more important for him to observe that the list places objects in equivalence, that it distances thought by inscribing it outside of us and that it allows us to act materially on discourse by modifying the text, by manipulating it, by carrying it with us, by putting it at a distance. What place does the idea of a written trace occupy in this inquiry? The logistical dimension of inscription is crucial for Goody, for reasons already mentioned in section 3.1, whose fertile value for culture he demonstrates with particular precision and in a very empirical way: “The importance of writing lies in the fact that it introduces a new means of communication between people. Above all, it makes it possible to reify speech, to give language a material correlation, a set of visible signs. In this material form, speech can be transmitted in 32 I do not examine, here, in order to avoid further development, the extreme consequences of subjecting writing to the material and cultural context in which it is interpreted as they manifest themselves in the so-called “integrational” conception of writing developed by Roy Harris (1994).

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space and can be preserved in time; what is said and thought can now be protected from the evanescent nature of oral communication” (Goody 2006, p. 8). However, if we study the reasons why this elementary logistical fact of inscription really matters for Goody, we find reasons that are not logistical in nature. We will limit ourselves, here, to two examples, the question of the fixing of the text and the cultural promise carried by writing. For Goody, the ability to fix the text, to take it in hand, to have it in front of our eyes, is a difference in nature, and not only of degree in the social circulation of ideas. Inscription, in the sense mentioned above, modifies the status and meaning of our intellectual activities, in the technical possibilities it opens up to engage the mind. To put it more clearly, written objects, in their materiality, solicit the thinking subject. Goody did not cease to object to the fact that the English expression “technologies of intellect” had been translated in his most famous book into the French technologies intellectuelles (intellectual technologies – an expression chosen a century earlier, in a completely different sense by Mallarmé) and he was irritated to see this expression, in which he did not recognize himself, constantly used in French-speaking social sciences. Indeed, for Goody, objects do not think; they create conditions of possibility for thought. He fully shares with Plato the idea that there is no thought without the engagement of the subject, while defending against him the fact that tools of inscription are one of the resources for critical distancing and affirmation of thought. Between the idea of technologies of intellect defended by Goody and the claim by different philosophers of contemporary technology or media for the power of intellectual technologies, the nuance is important. The idea that writing leads to fixation of the text, however, plays an essential role in the anthropologist’s thinking. Goody even thinks that a text does not exist in the sense that we know it in societies without writing. In a critical return to the methods he himself used at the beginning of his career, he sought to show that the translation of oral ceremonies into a “myth”, i.e. their written transcription into text, constitutes an act of violence exercised by representatives of literate sciences against societies without writing: a domestication of wild thinking (Goody 1979; Goody 2007, pp. 51–98). However, the role of writing is ambivalent for Goody. It can liberate thought as well as freeze it. In any case, it does not have the power to perpetuate by itself a regime of culture and society in a definitive way. For Goody, unlike Ferraris, what is written is not enacted. Indeed, on the one hand, writing (if you will, the written trace) is involved in the constitution of corpora, canons and doctrines that tend to become rigid, until they give rise to a form of dogmatism; but it is also writing which, by objectifying thought, putting it at a distance and allowing dialogue to open up around it, makes it possible to criticize and question cultural values, allowing the genesis of the critical mind. The development of limited or

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widespread literacy (the culture of reading and writing), therefore, requires specific analysis on a case-by-case basis, linked to historical and social contexts, to measure the reductive or creative effects of the use of inscription (Goody 2007). This is because the particular fecundity of writing – like that of rituals without an inscribed dimension – is mainly based on the forms of thought it has been able to create. If graphic reason exists for Goody, it is because humans have deployed particular forms on the media they have used, just as they have deployed other forms in the spaces they have inhabited and invested with social, ritual and festive values. The dialectic between the inscriptive dimension of writing and its symbolic power is, therefore, at the heart of the investigation of graphic reason, whose contribution lies in particular in the hypotheses formulated by Goody on the interaction between the shaping of thought and the conditions of its appropriation. “Variation in modes of communication is often as wide as that of modes of production, because it implies a development both of relationships between individuals and of possibilities for storage, analysis and creation in the order of knowledge”(Goody 1979, p. 86). Therefore, the category of information storage is part of a system with those of rearrangement, reorganization, sorting. What the concept of graphic reason favors is the way in which the inscription is translated into dispersions, rows, columns, comparisons and parallelisms, reductions, permutations. In short, the inscription is fixed, but it preserves less than it transforms. What matters most is that “the graphic reduction of the concepts of spoken language implies (or at least favours) transformations in the way they are ordered” (Goody 1979, p. 109). We can even go so far as to argue that it is the possibility of undoing (dissociating, moving, fragmenting, altering) that which it records to produce something new that assigns a dynamic value to writing, because it combines the effectiveness of manipulation with the creativity of vision, that it “gives people the cultural possibility to analyze, fragment, dissect and recompose the flow of speech” (Goody 1979, p. 202). The written form is therefore, in Goody’s work, as in that of other theorists of writing, more easily oriented towards what may happen in the future than towards what has been in the past. Certainly, it bears the trace of everything to which it can testify: the conditions of its production, the engagement of the subjects who produce it, the world to which it testifies, the thought that uses it, its appropriation by institutions. This is fully part of its value. However, if it were only a trace, writing would not be a technology of intellect. Writing is made to be manipulated and read. It is destined to live. The list, the table, the equation and the diagram suggest something to think about. Like the writings of Greek democracy, written objects are placed in the middle (εν μεσω) of the social world: they give people the opportunity to interact and think.

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It is with Anne-Marie Christin (1995) that this orientation of writing towards its future takes the strength of a radical theoretical gesture. The title of the book in which the founder of the Centre d’étude de l’écriture develops the theoretical foundations of her analyses, L’image écrite ou la déraison graphique (“The Written Image or Graphic Unreason”) (1995), clearly shows what distinguishes her view of writing from Goody’s interests, beyond the common project of analyzing the fecundity inherent in writing and the common refusal to submit it to speech. It is a question of approaching writing above all and, we might say, almost exclusively as an image. It is this character of an image traced on a medium and viewed by a reader that gives writing a particular power of thought and creation. In short, something like an iconocentrism that replies uncompromisingly to the primacy of language and speech in our alphabetical, rationalist and scientific society. In Christin’s work, writing is a symbolic practice that cannot be dissociated from both its technical substrate, and in particular its medium, and from a culture of the gaze. This is why, unlike the previous authors, Christin considers the alphabet to be a particular and very reductive form of writing, associated with a particular cultural sphere, which, consecrated by the Roman administration of Greek heritage, has spread to modern Western political and scientific institutions. A code that has no value, no end in sight, no general model. From the point of view of the written image, the alphabet is reductive in that it limits the written word to the sole role of encoding speech, while ideographic writings (cuneiform, hieroglyphic, Far Eastern) play on all the evocative possibilities of the medium, frames, intervals and figures. The historical movement that has led to the replacement – in a region of the globe – of mainly ideographic and especially hybrid writings by the exclusive primacy of phonetism does not, therefore, have for Christin the value of progress in the grammatization of thought or graphic reason. Conjuncturally speaking, it is rather in her eyes an impoverishment of the world of the written reduced to only one of its dimensions – at least in its principle, because alphabetic writing constantly rediscovers the image in the form of its surfaces of inscription, its spatial structures, its graphic and typographical forms, “starting to reconquer the readability lost by this kind of graphic abstraction of the voice” (Christin 2012, p. 13). Moreover, the omnipresence of the written image on so-called “multimedia” screens may open up a perspective of rediscovering the ideogram (Christin 2009, pp. 179–192). This quite schematic summary of L’image écrite makes it possible to understand why the idea of trace is particularly rejected (not denied but rejected) in this theory. The written image pertains to what has been traced out, since it consists of creating readable signs on a surface of inscription. It could only develop from a “screen thinking” (Christin 1995, p. 6) that guides the actions of humans to mark out surfaces in their environment to prepare them to receive signs. Isolating a surface on

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a cave and thus transforming a wall along it into a screen to look at, marking out an area in the sky to observe, scanning the shells of a turtle, this is a gesture that gradually became established in two practices, that of wall inscriptions and that of divination. This, of course, remains decisive on the page of a book as well as on the screen of our computers or the advertisements of our cities. The written image is made up of forms, spaces, visual rhythms and intervals, all inseparable from the medium upon which they are traced. Proposing such a thought about the screen is to reverse the temporal orientation of the trace schema. Defining writing as an image given to be read, and even to meditate on, is to make it a practice fundamentally oriented towards the future: “that of which the page is the medium, is not a state of fact but a tension generating meaning” (Christin 2009, p. 191). I even think that it is this creative orientation that justifies Christin’s entire approach, whose ultimate foundation is the commitment to a poetic social life. It in no way denies the existence of conditions for the production of the written sign or the use of the written word as a trace, which she observes is developing. However, it posits as a principle that writing, which can be instrumentalized in various ways, is really writing only in so far as it anticipates a reading, foments a reader. In other words, the social practice that underlies the symbolic system of writing is not the fact of being able to write but the fact of being able to be read. The organization of signs is entirely dependent on the “silent partner” (Christin 1995, pp. 71–98), the reader who must be able to interpret them. This theory does not deny the fact that written productions can be charged with indexicality – we can, as we will see below, interpret any text, whatever its substance of expression, as a trace – but this is not what interests Christin, because it is elsewhere that the power of writing lies. Writing is a sign that we question, an enigma, a form that requires intellectual and visual investment from us. This distance from writing as a trace is paradoxically valuable for the rest of our investigation. Returning to the trace schema described in Chapter 2, it is the question of presentification that is at stake in this confrontation between the image written upon its medium and the silent partner within its visual culture. If there are, as we have seen, many ways of constituting writings in traces of what has been, they can only acquire their status once they have been written, i.e. given to be read. The current success of dataviz (data visualization) in the full logical, alphanumeric and scientific mode of writing is an unconscious tribute to the written image by graphic reasoning. The radicalism of Christin’s theory helps us to understand how an assumption is charged, here and there, with value. For her, to look at writing as a trace is to turn it towards the past, to bring it back to its most banal part, to condemn itself to miss

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what it has brought to culture. A controversy between writing theorists has focused largly on the conditions for the invention of writing, in which they have quite often sought to define its specificity. We could discuss the relevance of this choice, because there is no particular reason to consider that the ways of inventing a symbolic system reveal its profound nature. What interests us here is to understand what is at stake in this debate. The dominant theories about the invention of writing are – like most theories currently dominant in the anthroposocial sciences – pragmatic in nature. The hypothesis that governs them is that writing was invented for practical reasons: to record exchanges, to inventory possessions, to record contracts, to control people and things. Christin defends, following several specialists in wall art and Sumerian and Chinese proto-writing, the thesis of an invention of writing as a symbolic reality: according to her, it concerns the transfer to human society of the forms and practices invented to read the messages of the gods. Faced with this hypothesis, the pragmatic genesis of writing betrays the projection onto ancient societies of the functioning of the Western technological and managerial society. It amounts to attributing to the founders of the scriptures a homo economicus mentality. It is the utilitarian and anachronistic paradigm typical of naive and learned anthropology, according to Wiktor Stozckowski (1994). What defines writing as such, on the contrary, for Christin and the authors of the History of Writing which she directed (Christin 2012), is the space of creation and meditation that the play of image offers to the reader, and it is this same potential that explains why we may have wanted to grasp the written image – why we may want to grasp it today – to capture the thought and imagination of a society. It is, therefore, the conception of writing as an image given to be read – as the object of a planned reading – that leads Christin to reject the logic that governs the dominant point of view on the genesis of writing. Against Ginzburg (1989) who sees in the reading of humans an extension of that of clues by the animal, suggesting a continuity from trace to writing33, Christin dares the paradox of conceiving the genesis of writing as a journey “from sign to trace” (Christin 2009, pp. 25–38), recognizing a real rupture in the invention of the readable and a real power in giving it to be read. It must be understood by this formula, which at first seems paradoxical, “from sign to trace”, that writing, resulting from divination and ritual images, could only acquire the character of trace in society to the extent that human beings had first been able to devote surfaces to the inscription of signs and to create forms to be read and a thought of reading. In the absence of this work on mediums, traced-out features and the arts of interpretation, we can imagine inscription and not writing as a symbolic and social system. In short, it is the assimilation of writing to simple inscription, which we have seen defended by Ferraris, that Christin opposes. 33 A more nuanced analysis of Ginzburg’s position is presented in section 4.2.2. However, Christin is right to attribute to him this global position of looking at writing as a trace resulting from natural attitudes.

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This point of view is understandable when compared to that of mediologists who use similar formulas, but with a different orientation: when Régis Debray (1994, p. 72) proposes to “resolutely draw the sign towards the trace, the discourse towards the path, the interpretation towards the instrumentation, the text towards the document, the writing towards the inscription”, while Louise Merzeau (in Merzeau and Arnaud 2009, pp. 21–29) entitles an article “From sign to trace, information made to measure” this is, contrary to Christin’s hypothesis, to become detached from an interpretation of the sign which they consider unduly idealistic in favor of concentrating upon the material dimension of the most technological and pragmatic substrate of communication. Our role, here, is not to decide in this debate and even less on the question of origins, which divides specialists in Mesopotamian and Chinese writing. What is not in doubt is that in the contemporary world, the functions of writing as a trace and as a written image, both of which are constructed, are equally attested. Whether or not the written trace has the status of an index, icon or symbol, it only acquires this status when it is given to be read. This is why the thought of the screen and the silent partner of writing do not leave us when we examine the major devices of traceability, which are part of many modes of production, but exist in society only as written images. The importance of the written trace as a preconceived idea can be measured by revisiting the debates that the theory of the written image has given rise to among trace theorists. In January 1997, the Iconic College of the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) invited Christin for a seminar session that resulted in a written transcript (Christin 1997). The presentation of the main argument, summarized above, was followed by an exchange between researchers during which the notion of trace, which Christin explicitly had rejected in her presentation, came back in force in many interventions and gave rise to an instructive dialogue between the psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron and the author of L’image écrite. Tisseron strives to reconcile the thought of the screen with the idea of trace by giving the latter a particular meaning: “[…] the trace, is the desire to transform the medium, even before the desire to inscribe a meaning on the medium. […]. And it is perhaps, here, that we could develop something about the opposition between the trace and the imprint, which are often confused. The imprint can be left by chance, without intention. On the other hand, I believe that the trace is inseparable from the desire to transform the medium and to constitute it as a screen, as you say very well” (Weaver in Christin 1997, p. 15).

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However, Christin did not wish to adopt this term and, on this occasion, she confirmed the respective bias adopted by those who speak of written trace and written image, two points of view that are irreconcilable in her eyes: “As far as the surface of inscription is concerned – I think that the notion of a screen has the advantage of being able to be considered in both ways. What I am most concerned about at the moment, but it will also be necessary to come to the surface of inscription, is the surface of reception. I am especially interested in the fact that, if you contemplate a wall, you will see this or that shape appear on it…” (Christin 1997, p. 16). The dialogue continues, and to Tisseron who objected: “But still, inscription is something essential for each of us at a very early stage, and is fundamental” she answered: “For me, inscription is still really too marked by philosophical presuppositions of linguistic origin for me not to try as much as possible to avoid it; and I am not sure that the screen is enough on its own as a concept, as the philosophers say” (Christin 1997, p. 32). This difference in perspective will finally be confirmed by Tisseron, giving us the opportunity to explore this small investigation into the presumption of the trace by the return Tisseron makes to a kind of ichnology: “We are not talking about inscription in the same form, nor about trace in the same form. You take things more in terms of writing because that’s what you’re studying, and I take things more in terms of appropriation of the medium by any form of trace” (Christin 1997). 3.4.2. The written trace, a device of social knowledge power I will mention more briefly another historical mode of existence of the written trace, indisputably linked to the previous one, the creation of devices mobilizing the written document as a device of examination – in the words of Michel Foucault from whom this analysis is taken. If I come back, here, to these analyses referring to the classical age, it is to the extent, as some ICS researchers observed very early on (Mattelart 1976; Mattelart 1994), that the mechanisms of monitoring, controling and steering of the social world through the written trace play a major role in contemporary information and communication industries. A chapter in Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish, which analyzes the transformations of modes of social control, and in particular the “illegalisms” that threaten power, is entitled “The Means of Correct Training” (Foucault 1975,

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pp. 200–264). Foucault proposes a historical journey through the changes that have taken place in techniques of control of the social world and violence: after the appearance of torture and then the rational gradation of sentences, a strategy gradually unfolds over the 17th and 18th Centuries that focuses on the “body that is manipulated and shaped, that is trained, that obeys, that responds, that becomes skilled or whose forces multiply” (1975, p. 160). These techniques, which Foucault calls “disciplines”, aim to produce, on a large scale and through constant control, “docile bodies”. To simplify, it is a question of getting subjects to internalize rules of functioning and, therefore, in short, to avoid needing to be punished themselves. What we have called, here, the written trace – as we have seen with a particular focus on writing – is a major element of this device34, with the organization of space and time, the codification of tasks, the definition of roles, the implementation of sanctions and, on another level, the creation of panoptic systems that allow subjects to be constantly subjected to the consciousness of being monitored, actually or potentially. Foucault, who is in fact working to define power structures that span society as a whole, describes the system of bodily discipline in four major institutions, the army, prison, hospital and school. If physical discipline is mainly illustrated by the army (the school becoming a kind of barracks in its image), it is the school that offers the most complete image of the examination, a term by which Foucault refers to the deployment of writing in the order of power: so much so that all institutions of power also affirm themselves as kinds of schools, because they must both disseminate social knowledge and values and develop social knowledge about individuals and their dispositions. The term “examination” can be understood in the most common sense of the term, because the moment of the examination is when the role of control and training in a school is most obvious, but it is above all the set of means by which a power can examine society, and more particularly each of its members, and thus produce social knowledge about them. The examination in the strict sense, with its subjects, copies, notes and report cards, is the archetype of the documentary system that allows the school to produce detailed information and a body of available inscriptions on the conduct, dispositions and capacities of individuals. We also understand, by the same 34 I use the term, here, in the sense used by Foucault, a set of technical, discursive, institutional means to respond to an emergency, in this case that of preserving social order and the exercise of power from the risk of social excesses. This choice is linked to the desire to understand in its theoretical framework the analysis of the role of the written trace. In the rest of the book, the term is limited to a more defined use, that of info-communication devices, as described in section 2.4.1. Foucault’s effort to highlight disciplines and powers has as its counterpart a low interest in the means that people can deploy to escape them, which on the contrary are the focus of attention of other research currents, such as Certeau’s inquiry into cultural practices; taking these practices into account leads to a less systematic definition of a device (Jeanneret 2014, pp. 266–288).

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token, that this type of massive, continuous and individualized examination of our behavior is exactly what media industry actors are doing today when they collect “traces of use” and draw social knowledge and power from them. It is for this reason that a good understanding of how Foucault’s examination works is essential to analysis of the contemporary industry of the traces of the social world. The “examination” process is the name given by Foucault to a device – in the words of the ICS to a set of mediations and mediatizations of experience – that creates relationships of knowledge-power: it is a question of knowing as precisely as possible what individuals do and can do to be able to control, anticipate and regulate their behavior, as well as to lead them to do it themselves. It is above all the dynamics of the relationship between domain-knowledge and power that defines the examination device. “The examination allows the teacher, while transmitting his domain-knowledge, to establish a whole field of domain-knowledge about his students” (Foucault 1975, p. 219). Indeed, the examination, i.e. the constant production of traces of students’ activities, and more broadly of social subjects, has the effect of making these individual practices and provisions visible and readable. The importance of the examination, therefore, lies in the fact that technologies of writing mark the culmination of a process of changing the relationship of visibility: while the sovereign monarch was visible in the splendor of his public occasions as in the splendor of the torments inflicted on criminals, while leaving the social body in the shadows, managerial power itself becomes invisible while projecting a constant light on the people who are subject to it. “Disciplinary power […] is exercised by making itself invisible; on the other hand, it imposes a principle of mandatory visibility on those it makes subject” (Foucault 1975, p. 220). As a result, access to writing changes its meaning profoundly: where, when reserved for distinguished beings, it expressed glory, it is now focused on “documenting” the most ordinary conduct for the benefit of dispersed and largely elusive powers. This is why the written word, and more precisely the written trace, plays a decisive role in this system. We can say that it mediates visibility through readability. It is enough to follow Foucault word for word to see the deployment, guided by a political aim, of all the dimensions of the written trace studied so far. This needs no comment. “The examination makes individuality enter a documentary field”. Constituting a “tenuous and tiny archive”, “the examination which places individuals in a field of surveillance also places them in a network of writing; it engages them in a whole thickness of documents that capture and fix them” (Foucault 1975, pp. 221–222). It is obviously the paradigm of thinking of the written word as a trace that informs this technology of thought and power: the examination creates inscriptions and makes them available, it collects indices of conduct and personality and makes visible to the present an indefinite collection of acts from various past temporalities to bear witness to them. In short, all the risks that Christin had identified in the presumption of the written trace show their full efficiency here.

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The politics of the written trace as an examination consists of a translation of the knowledge and powers of the written word into a “writing apparatus”. The examination deploys a whole set of “small techniques of notation, recording, filing, entering into columns and tables” that ensure “the entry of the individual (and no longer the species) into the field of domain knowledge” (Foucault 1975, pp. 223– 224). The register is the material object (the medium) that particularly embodies this transmutation of an individual’s actions into a documentary archive of their life that is available for possible use. It is the indexical interpretation of the written word that forms the basis of this documentary practice, but it is the formal properties of graphic reason that give it its political effectiveness. Of course, in this context, which is clearly governed by a rational management of social issues, it is a very limited textual format, far removed from the poetic virtue of the written image, a kind of radical graphic reason, that triumphs. Persons and acts are distributed among the areas of inscription or disappear from them, can be placed on tables and lists, are ordered among them and are divided into criteria, are quantified, compared and measured. Of course, the high-school diploma report card, the employee’s evaluation interview report, the researcher’s list of publications and the sales graph of the sales agent all fall within the info-communication processes described by Foucault. They are much more than an “informational double” of individuals, as is too often written: the definition of headings, the place given to what is formulated or kept silent, the deployment of forms in frames, the reduction of signs to numbers, curves and graphs constitute devices for representing what has been, or is supposed to have been. Documentary techniques produce “the individual as they can be described, measured, compared to others and all of this in their own individuality; and it is also the individual whom we have to train or rebuke, whom we have to classify, normalize or exclude” (Foucault 1975, p. 224). Students waiting for their thesis report, recruiters receiving a CV and evaluators of a research team’s files appreciate the importance of the formats in which the examination reflects the complexity, by drastically reducing it, to a space of thoughts and practices. Foucault’s analysis is not invoked, here, as a sociological theory of the powers of the written trace, but as a problematic framework for analyzing the political future of the written trace. The conditions of the contribution made by writing to the examination of the social world are changing today with the transformations of its production regimes, its media, the circulation of its forms. They are especially affected by changes in the current media space in the relationship between domain knowledge and power, for example, the fact that mutual surveillance is developing and that subjects tend to submit themselves to self-documentation. The social life of writings is subject to regimes of legitimacy in which the power of the state institutions studied by Foucault, and in particular that of the school, is strongly contested and exposed to external norms. In this context, marked by the economic

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exploitation of all cultural practices, the challenge of examination for economic and political powers concerns less systematically the control of behavior and more often the exploitation of the diversity of social styles and predilections (Jeanneret 2014). These are all features that require us not to repeat Foucault’s analysis in the same terms, but to look for ways in which the problems he has deployed can reflect social dynamics that he did not foresee (Colombo 2014). A real analysis of the examination in contemporary media would require distinguishing between its multiple variants, particularly those in which domainknowledge is less about individuals than about what makes it possible to group them and enroll them in practices. This, again, would require an entire book. Foucault’s reading of the theory of examination showed that the deployment of the written trace, based on theoretical biases that are often implicit but strong, is also a matter of engineering technical and social devices that put it at the service of political instrumentalizations. It shows that if the written trace is a stake which is coveted by all powers, it is because of its ability to tie domain-knowledge and power together. 3.4.3. The written trace, an educational mediation One of the processes that contribute to the social life of signs and devices is the development of domain-knowledge related to professional activities. Indeed, these fields of practice develop specific discourses, terminologies and communication devices. Without ceasing to be immersed in the context of the language and representation of a society and a historical moment, terms and ideas acquire from actors in the professions and their privileged interlocutors (users, clients, managers) a particular socio-discursive status as specialized terminologies, as modes of operationalization and optimization of forms of mediation, and more generally as expressions of various claims to give communication a particular effectiveness (Seurrat 2018). We will mention, here, by way of example, a sector in which the expression “written trace” has acquired such privileged and applied status, that of education and training. This expression, whose presence has gradually been confirmed recently in the official texts and instructions of the French Ministry of Education (Promonet 2017), is omnipresent in the speeches which are exchanged between teachers on the requirements of the profession (Philippot and Niclot 2011). Still more mentioned than defined in the official instructions, it is the subject of a particularly rich production of documents by actors from national education academies as well as the main teachers’ unions, not to mention the work of researchers in the education

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sciences. In short, while touching upon all the dimensions of writing mentioned in this chapter – enacting them in a way in the classroom and in the teaching community – the “written trace” becomes something special in the world of education: a typical format of educational mediation and more precisely a specific figure of the mediation-mediatization coupling, as we have encountered it since the beginning of our investigation (section 1.1.3). Recalling some of the conclusions of the research conducted by Pierre Mœglin (2005; 2016) on the development of educational tools and media makes it possible to approach this social and institutional construction starting from the broader challenges of the world of education, its professionalization and its industrialization. In the field of education, the mediation-mediatization couple takes on a particular meaning, which is linked to the specific purposes of this activity, which can be understood in a circumscribed sense as a mediation of domain knowledge, as well as, in a broader sense, as a place for the development of capacities and attitudes in the world that are at once those of subjects, individuals and citizens. The written trace at school obviously contributes to the logistical and symbological powers of writing in general. “Words and gestures are the ordinary signs of educational communication, but these signs are not enough. They need to be carried further, kept longer, reused elsewhere and later” (Moeglin 2005, p. 75). However, the scope of these virtualities is particular because it is a question of transmitting domain knowledge and training people. There is, therefore, an educational future for media devices, and in particular writing tools: “If some tools and media are not immediately educational, some become so when they are integrated into the training system and when their educational legitimacy is socially recognized” (Mœglin 2005, p. 11). This is exactly what happens to the expression “written trace” when it becomes a central tool in pedagogical practice and training, such as the evaluation of not only pupils, but also teachers. The development of writing tools and formats specific to teaching is an old story, as Mœglin points out while regretting that these particular challenges of mediation and mediatization have not been sufficiently studied in relation to the dominant definition of the media: “Among the Greeks, he recalled, the term hypomnema refers to the medium of any kind of annotation, banker’s book, trader’s record, epitaph […]. But there is, as we know less, a pedagogical hypomnema. This is the collection of notes taken by students during and after class” (Moeglin 2005, pp. 10–11).

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It is not going too far as to say that the written trace is the heiress of the hypomnemata and that the place it occupies in teaching is the result of a long and centuries-old historical genesis that has gone through different phases, from indifference to integration into an educational project, including bricolage, unreflective practice and theory divorced from action (Mœglin 2005, pp. 96–111). The most important thing in this history is that it shows the particular challenges of the intervention of writing in the educational act. Education mediated by written media is not a simple an extension or a transfer of direct instruction, distance learning: “Writing is not the same as the content of the oral written on paper. Mediatization is also not mediation transposed onto magnetic tape or digital recording. From a situation of mediation without mediatization, where the schoolmaster’s word has the monopoly, to a situation of instrumented, mechanized or digitized mediation, the transition is not achieved by addition. A different relationship, never comparable precisely to the previous one, is substituted for the face-to-face meeting, with two or more people” (Mœglin 2005, p. 24). That is why taking written mediation fully seriously – in all the dimensions mentioned above and not just as a record – is a means of combating the “reductionism of transfer” (Moeglin 2005, p. 26) in education. Briefly summarized, here, Moeglin’s analysis shows several essential things. Writing brings about transformations in the pedagogical relationship, because it doubles and moderates the pastoral face-to-face interaction of influence and contact by imposing a relationship placed it in a third-party position to the texts of a culture. It participates in the adjustment of relations between the school and society, made of openness and closure to the world. It introduces another figure of domain knowledge, insofar as it materializes and distances the relationship that everyone can maintain and develop with it. More fundamentally, the specific aim of education requires that “educational subjectivation and communicative objectification must not be dissociated” (Moeglin 2005, p. 30). In other words, the professional sector of education is one of those in which the reduction of writing to the recording of an act is most obviously inadequate: this is the paradox of the written trace in schools. The intense documentary production generated by the notion of “written trace” in social educational collectives makes it possible to measure the concrete impact of these issues. The most important fact to highlight is the concrete, technical and circumscribed meaning of written expression in schools. While some authors extend the notion to any document, the vast majority of them are specific writings: those written in the classroom individually under the teacher’s supervision and included in the notebook that the student takes home.

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A questionnaire survey conducted by two researchers in education sciences specializing in the analysis of work (Philippot and Niclot 2011) among teachers in three disciplines (French, life and earth sciences, and history and geography) shows that most of these professionals consider production of such writings to be a decisive task in their profession and that they devote thorough pedagogical, communicative and methodological reflection to them. In particular, it confirms that this term, which has become a specialized concept (Couzinet 2015), crystallizes many of the methodological issues related to class management. The production of “written traces” – researchers use quotation marks to highlight the constructed status of the notion – constitutes a “class moment” that involves a situation, aims, criteria, procedures. The investigators asked teachers about the functions they assigned to the production of written traces, the difficulties they encountered in carrying out this task and the piece of advice they would give to young colleagues to master it. The result is a broad consensus on a multidimensional conception of the role of written mediation – by no means reduced to the dominant trace schema. This is clearly present in the idea of a “conserving function”. However, many insist on the dialectic between “dead memory”, and thus setting the course, and “living memory”, which means the possibility of reactivating thought and allowing personal appropriation, as an extension of Goody’s analyses summarized above. If each discipline projects specific expectations onto these acts of writing, which recall the intellectual and methodological content of the pedagogical issues (e.g. the recording of an experiment report in the natural sciences or work on language in French), the written trace appears as the place for actualizing and evaluating “transversal learning”. It is a circulating document, which goes beyond the time and space of the classroom, a tool invested with the project of mastering language and thought. The recognition of the educational legitimacy of the written trace, according to Moeglin’s expression, is particularly expressed in the production of metaeducational documents, advice, sheets, training programs and reference material, many of which take stock of what the written trace is, what it is not, what its functions are, how it can be implemented. These are both analytical and normative documents – in short, questions and answers at the same time – which signify their character as applied knowledge (Seurrat 2018). The very existence of this production of documents and the formats it adopts are in themselves significant. The enunciation is very focused and practical. It mainly involves numbered paragraphs, checklists, tables and diagrams that evoke the functions of reminder and guide. The major themes are organized around the question of the different functions of the written trace and the methods for its implementation.

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My analysis of a corpus of such documents35 largely corroborates the survey conducted by Philippot and Niclot, while showing the richness of the expectations invested in the students’ writing activity and the notebook that contains it: in other words, the polychresia of the written trace in school. The dominant function of these texts clearly contributes to the trace schema. The written trace is “the evidence of the student’s activities during the session” (visual presentation, Académie de Strasbourg), or even the “reflection of the course” (blog of a teacher from the Académie de Versailles); it records “what remains in the students’ files or notebooks when the history or geography course is finished” (written document, IUFM de Versailles): “it is essentially a question of preserving a record of discoveries, procedures and rules following research or discovery work” (SNUIPP trade-union brochure). The conservation, recollection and fixation of achievements constitute the core of the functions attributed to these productions, which probably justifies the use of the term “record”. However, the preservation and presentification of the past is only a beginning for the advice being produced, and writing intervenes above all as a cultural and productive mediation, oriented towards the future, in a context where the particular status of the school space and the specificity of educational activities, as described by Moeglin, are decisive. The document written by a teacher from a French teacher training college, IUFM de Versailles, shows a conscious integration of the different levels of writing, while placing writing in the context of the process of domain knowledge: “the written trace of knowledge in development helps to process information, to reflect and to think. The written trace of stabilized domain knowledge helps to expose in order to preserve, to keep a record of what we have discovered”. The writings in the notebook provide a link between school and home life, between classroom time, personal work and subsequent proofreading. Writing appears above all as an opportunity to deploy graphic reason – without the term being mentioned, because the texts do not involve theoretical references: distance learning, reflexivity, the synthetic and organizational capacity of the written word, its power to make reference are very generally invoked. Above all, writing appears to be a technology and an art requiring the use of writing skills, organization of thought and synthesis. The communicative question of the destination of these writings, of how they can be read, as well as how to prepare students to be readable, is omnipresent. The production and appropriation of the written trace is an opportunity, for teachers and those who intend to train them, to learn to write and read.

35 This analysis is based on the study of a non-rigorous exploratory corpus, based on a personal documentary search using keyword searches and academic portals. It consists of 12 documents produced by actors from different French national education academies (Strasbourg, Grenoble, Versailles, Poitiers), two training programs and three trade union documents for new teachers.

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The methodological and pragmatic dimension of the production of these writings is the other major challenge that these documents seek to master. This gives rise to a series of practical questions (of commonplaces in the rhetorical sense): for whom? When? Where? How? With what? How much? The question of time, which brings up the question of the priorities and constraints of the syllabus, particularly crystallizes these thorny questions, which reveal the methods and frameworks of the school: “this permanent and progressive learning, even though it seems timeconsuming, is decisive for the pupils” (summary document, Grenoble Academy). The definition of an object, the written trace, leads, despite or contrary to its very name, to question the process of individual and collective writing and reading. A mischievous sentence that has slipped into one of the practical documents tells us this: “it is not imposed by the teacher but it is what the teacher wants the students to remember: lexicon, grammar, cultural and methodological elements”. Education researchers had taken care to note that the trace records only part of the teaching and learning activity, the memory of a few acts, referring back to the complexity of the link between a practice and the traces that the written document can provide. A speech analyst, Aurore Proponet (2017), has done more: she built a system for collection and recording of documents on the sequences of elaborating the written trace – a product of mediated traces of the trace – and applied the methods of textual genetics as we encountered them in section 3.3.2 to the phases of elaborating texts written in the notebooks. This allowed her to highlight the importance of the multiple temporalities of this writing (from preparation to the final writing, including the students’ interventions and the teacher’s reactions). This work to unfold a space–time of the written trace, as a process of communication, fully reveals, in the field of the school, the complexity of the genesis of any written trace, the fact that this writing is woven orally, that it presents a strong polyphony and that the author function is particularly complex and evasive. Taking up the categories of Dominique Maingueneau (2009), Proponet observes that the teacher is a respondent author (responsible for production), an actor (participant in the writing) but not an auctor (recognized creator) since these texts are not and cannot be signed. The exploration of the different levels of complexity of the written trace, as a technological, communicational and political production, cannot be completed without giving the last word to availability, from which we have departed. Philippot and Niclot observe that we can rely on written traces to study the teaching profession through production of the written trace. They do so in a way that fully respects the educational aim of this profession. It goes without saying that nothing prevents us from using all this written production to carry out a managerial examination, supervision and control of the education community.

4 The Emerging Trace of the Media Text

The analysis of how the trace schema is translated into concrete devices of representation (Chapter 2) and the specific study of the written trace (Chapter 3) leads to the same observation that the trace of social phenomena circulating in the media always reaches us in text form. Whether it be a photo, a number or a script of computer code entered on a programming application, it is never raw or isolated, but is written on media, surrounded by signs, integrated into frameworks of expression, taking socially readable forms. The question we are going to ask now is different from this one, although intimately linked to it. Given that all symbolic productions circulate in the media, media texts, whatever they may be, may become traces in the eyes of some of their audiences, their users and even their producers. This is what I call here the emerging trace of media texts: their interpretation as traces of something other than themselves. We have already encountered this phenomenon in a summary form, by noting, for example, that an exchange of emails intended to get news from a friend living abroad and the work of recording a screenshot of a tourist site may be interpreted and even calculated – in this case wrongly – to be a sign of interest in taking a trip (section 1.3). The blatancy of this blunder masks the extent and complexity of the operations, successful or not, relevant and/or efficient, by which texts of all kinds are transformed into indices and witnesses of what we do, what we are, what we desire. Some texts are sometimes created by their authors with the deliberate aim of leaving traces for various reasons (legal, political, family, etc.). However, most texts are produced for completely different purposes such as to establish contact, open a dialogue, create beauty, declare one’s love or simply transmit practical information ... None of the authors of such texts has the intention, when leaving a word on a business card, publishing an editorial, drawing a landscape on a notebook, writing a love letter, scribbling an address, of creating traces that they will one day bear witness to what has been. However, all these texts can be treated as traces of various social or personal

The Trace Factory, First Edition. Yves Jeanneret. © ISTE Ltd 2020. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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realities and it is increasingly common for them to be so. Thus, cards that soldiers sent from the front to reassure their families during World War I are now considered as documents revealing their mentality or situation (Guéno 2014); television programs from different periods are interpreted as a sign of their preoccupations (Casetti and Odin 1990) or comments posted on forums are collected in many sociologically inspired studies, from master’s dissertations to opinion polling agencies, to track the dominant values of a social group, or even its “lifestyle”. All this feeds a metrology, or rather a “social meteorology” (Boutaud in Boutaud and Verón 2007, p. 67), as rather adventurous but promising considerable success, from the massive questionnaire surveys of the 1950s to contemporary Big Data and text mining. If we focus, here, on this question, it is precisely, as the previous example shows, because the desire to make traces from all the kinds of texts that we exchange is now invasive, extended to ever-wider fields of daily life and culture and conducted on an increasingly industrial scale. However, most often, we do not pay attention to this phenomenon, because it may seem natural and, as we have seen above, the trace is a sign that is not easily questioned. This is reflected in the absence of reference to the concept of text in analyses, whether euphoric or critical, of the power of “data” presented by most sociologists or philosophers of technology. Hence, in order to study complex industrial devices, especially those that use computers (often called “digital” traces), it is necessary to question in a precise and concrete way what allows us to transform the most everyday texts into traces, in the search of the fundamental processes upon which this transformation is based, on material, social and symbolic levels. This approach requires a brief but essential reminder of the use of the word “text” in communication sciences, in line with the first considerations of the concept expressed in section 2.4.2. Common conceptions of text, including in most anthroposocial sciences, essentially see it as an organized sequence of words: pieces of language deployed in a linear manner on a medium. This is not at all what we are discussing here. A verbal, oral or written matter is obviously one of the ways to textualize the world. There are three reasons why communication researchers do not consider a text as a mere emanation of verbal language. On the one hand, no text exists only as a set of words, it is always deployed upon a perceptible materiality. On the other hand, all texts, even the most literary or mathematical, combine multiple codes, and finally, texts are presented as immediately complex and concrete entities. It is only the eye of the beholder that can choose to divide them into shapes and elements, especially verbal ones. The perceptible, plural, concrete, complex nature of the texts conveyed by the media appears as soon as they are understood within the practical processes of social communication. So, to isolate a type of sign within the texts distributed by the communication media to assign it a particular function is an act of abstraction. As semiotician Paolo Fabbri writes:

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“Naturally, we can retain the idea that there are certain signs that are considered, from a certain perspective, as ultimate. This does not mean, however, that there are always ultimate signs, such as words, whose combination produces sentences and texts. Rather, the opposite is true: ‘there are only texts’, not texts of simple words, but texts of complex objects, parts of words, gestures, images, sounds, rhythms and so on, i.e. groups that can be segmented according to the needs or urgencies of the situation” (Fabbri 2008, p. 68)1. The emerging trace of texts, as it unfolds in our society, can only be understood and even, before that, perceived in all its scope, if we retain a fairly broad and comprehensive definition of what a text is. What most authors in the social sciences and engineering call traces or data are objects derived from human or automatic interpretation of texts such as a date on a diary, a post on a document exchange network, a photo with a caption, an email, the activation of an icon, the placing of an “emoji” in a post and, why not, a research article in a journal or the presentation of this book on the publisher’s website. To give a simple example, the creation of the device called Knowledge Graph, which allows Google to automatically produce compact presentations of a person, idea or institution as an aggregate of words and images, results from the transformation into traces of identity of an extensive set of texts, in the general sense mentioned above. It is this type of consideration that has long led the members of the research collective to which I belong to retain a broad and multidimensional definition of the concept of “text”: “The text is a material object, singular, complex, and heterogeneous. This object is based on an intimate union between the medium and the message. It is based on codes, some of which are strict and others more vague, in terms of the assembly of signs (alphabetical text being a special case). It can be assigned meaning through reference to established models. It offers markers for an enunciative relationship (implying communication) and representations of the world while defining its own boundaries. In this way, the text is open because it enters into a relationship, explicit or not, with other texts” (Jeanneret 2001a, p. 14). Our analysis will, therefore, start from the text understood as an empirical and material object, singular and complex, while considering as determinative that this object is intended to be interpreted socially, therefore, constituted as a text in the theoretical sense of the term (Badir 2012) with the whole constituting “a configuration that builds ‘a whole of meaning’” (Dondero 2011, p. 22). 1 For a more complete discussion of the concept of “text” in computerized media, see Jeanneret (2001a) and Jeanneret (2004).

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There are many ways to turn this complex and significant object into a trace of practices, identities, forms and social forces. I do not intend to describe the dispersion of these processes. Instead, I will try to identify here three different logics of emerging trace. The first, resulting from an aesthetic approach, in the broad sense of the term, consists of recognizing in the forms of the contemporary text the record of the technical, sensory and intellectual history that developed them. The second logic concerns an instrumental approach of traversing the text to collect clues (or indices) as to what it may reveal outside itself is based on a very different, pragmatic but no less interpretative approach to cultural facts. The third logic sees the text also as a productive device, so it can be deliberately turned back into a machine for producing cultural traces. For each of these three main logics, it will be a question of revisiting works that have particularly dealt with this question, in order to highlight the way in which these issues find their relevance in the contemporary media. These three logics are interdependent but, for methodological reasons, we will focus successively on each one of them.

4.1. The poetics of Mnemosyne: media forms and social memory Mnemosyne (in Greek Μνημοσυνη) is one of the goddesses whom the Theogony of Hesiod, a reference source for Greek mythology, assigns a major place. Goddess of the founding age of the Titans, daughter of the Earth (Gaia) and Heaven (Ouranos), sister of the Law (Themis), she shares with these gods of origin the privilege of bearing a proper name which is also a common name: memory. Memory is for the Greeks a seminal faculty, a source of creation and knowledge2, whose power Mnemosyne consecrated to herself by giving birth, from her union with Zeus, to the nine Muses, who embody the different fields of culture and knowledge. She was, therefore, one of the miracle workers of these titanic times, like Prometheus, tamer of fire and creator of industry – and Atlas, condemned to carry the world on his shoulders, before supporting the balconies of the bourgeois residences of Haussmann’s architecture. Renaissance historian Abraham-Moritz (Aby) Warburg displayed the word ΜΝΗΜΟΣΥΝΗ in Greek capitals (so that Mnemosyne or memory could be understood) at the entrance of the reading and conference room of his Library of Cultural Sciences (Kullturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg): a titanic and labyrinthine library that this son of a banker who gave up his financial career had built and transformed over the years on the basis of the family fortune. He also devoted the last years of his existence to the creation of the Mnemosyne Atlas, a vast system for collection and display of images of all periods and statuses, gathered and 2 In the text of Plato’s Phaedra quoted in section 3.1, the god Thoth announces that writing will make Egyptians more capable of memory (μνημοσικωτερους) and wisdom (σοφωτερους).

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constantly redistributed on large panels covered with a black canvas (Warburg 2012). This atlas of images (Bilderatlas) is said to be unfinished because Warburg had planned its publication, but it could also, like the library, be considered as not intended for completion. This enterprise of collecting and handling disparate objects, long neglected, after having inspired many questions following Warburg’s death (Settis in Baratin and Jacob 1996, pp. 122–124), has fascinated specialists in culture and images for several decades – as has Benjamin’s contemporary and in some respects comparable work, tirelessly recording the traces of the 19th Century in his Arcades Project (Benjamin 1989). Above all, it has given rise to a number of debates, due to the enigmatic nature of the venture and the numerous but unpublished, scattered and constantly rewritten texts that accompany it. As Roland Recht observes (in Warburg 2012, p. 10): “the idiosyncrasy of his style, with its neologisms and abundance of nouns, synonyms and rarity of verbs, does not facilitate the understanding of his thought, constantly in motion, formulated in the form of fragments, and often using diagrams.” The editor of the atlas in French observes that any interpretation is weakened by the fact that no one can be certain to have read all these scattered and incompletely edited fragments. Under these conditions, we wondered above all how to understand the image-related concepts that embody the practical and intellectual gesture of the researcher: space of thought (Denkraum), survival (Nachleben), pathos formula (Pathosformel), engraving (Prägung/Prägewerk), impression (Ausdruck/Eindruck), engram (Engramma), distinctive mark (Kennzeichen), interval (Zwischenraum), representation (Darstellung), memory (Gedächtnis), embracing gaze (Übersicht), orientation (Orienterung), prefiguration (Vorprägung), value (Wert), distance (Distanz) and genetics (Erbmasse)3. The sources of the project have been defined, ranging from work on the Italian Renaissance, the experience of a terrible war, the technological evolution of libraries in the first decades of the 20th Century, the personal experience of schizophrenia which for Warburg is the very principle of civilization, the philosophical and aesthetic debates linked to the sciences of antiquity and the discovery of Amerindian cultures. Different interpretations of the gesture of collection have been proposed, and its status (aesthetic, philosophical, 3 Of course, none of these translations are satisfactory or assured. Like the rendering of the Greek word φαρμακον by the doublet remedy/poison or that of Peirce’s index by both indice and index in French, the translation of the two Italian words traccia/spia by the single trace or the difficulty in English of expressing the French parallelism trace/tracé (trace/traced-out feature, in English), they reduce the connotative scope of the German terms and project the stylistic choices of Warburg into a semantic world that is foreign to them.

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political) and epistemological claim have been defined in different ways. It has been suggested that there are intellectual influences and similarities with Lessing, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin and Foucault. Some have seen these theorists who share with him a desire to understand the history of forms, Gombrich, Cassirer, Panofsky and Baxandall, as his heirs, and others have accused them of betraying his project4. There are different reasons why these undertakings, and in particular the image atlas, are interesting for our purpose. It is because they seem to actualize in a method of thought and in a material device the main categories of thought which we have encountered so far. It is not certain, however, that the Mnemosyne Atlas, placed under the sign of engraving and form, can be defined as a collection of traces. One can rather think that it questions the schema of the trace, through the very particular way in which it encounters its components, the indexical interpretation of the objects, the temporal aspect of the it has been, the presentification of the past, the fermenting character of the objects.

Figure 4.1. Plate 8 of the Mnemosyne Atlas “Ascension to the Sun”, from the October 1929 photographic campaign (photographic collection, Warburg Institute, University of London) 4 On these debates, see in particular Gombrich (2015); Michaud (1998); Didi-Huberman (2002; 2011); Johnson (2012); Recht in Warburg (2012, pp. 7–48); Hagelstein (2014).

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It is, therefore, the very constitution of the atlas that we will try to investigate, as a practical, theoretical and media gesture. We will retain the hypothesis that the atlas can help us, symmetrically, to problematize the act of constituting cultural objects in traces. We will first return to the material characteristics of the image atlas as a theoretical approach embodied in a device. Then, we will focus on the theoretical consequences of addressing the persistence of the past in terms of the life of forms and the questions that this point of view poses for the trace schema. We will finally examine how Mnemosyne can inspire an analysis of contemporary media and, in particular, that of devices of trace production.

4.1.1. A mediatized space of thought Beyond the fierce controversies that Warburg’s approach has generated, some striking and original features of his approach are emphasized by all authors, whatever the interpretations they propose of these gestures – from the promotion of the unconscious for some, to the affirmation of a project of personal knowledge for others. It is this particular fact that we will try to describe here. Let us start with some concrete elements of description. What is the Mnemosyne Atlas? We will first confine ourselves to an overall description, the one generally used by commentators, which we will have to make more precise later on. The Mnemosyne Atlas is above all a construction that belongs to the broader project of a library of cultural sciences. The Warburg library is of course dedicated to the conservation and spatial deployment of a gigantic collection of books, as well as of images, mainly photographic. When it was transferred from Hamburg, where it had its most developed location, to London, due to the rise of Nazism, it contained 60,000 books and 25,000 photographs. However, one can also compare it to the institution dedicated to “demonstrating... that capitalism is also capable of intellectual achievements of such magnitude that they could not have been achieved otherwise”5 at the Alexandria Museum: it is not only a library, as the latter is not only a museum (Jacob 2007). It is a workspace in which Warburg and his collaborators manipulate objects (books and images) and analyze them and where the historian gives a large number of lectures, sometimes accompanied by exhibitions. The atlas was therefore above all a task of collecting and selecting numerous reproductions of graphic works as well as other images, classified in the library, gathered to accompany conferences, pinned on panels or projected using transparent plates, lanterns or with an opaque projector. Gradually, the project became a specific production which, after having passed through several forms, became an 5 Letter from Aby to his brother Max, quoted by Mahieu (2008, p. 73).

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autonomous object to which Warburg gradually devoted all his time and energy. The image atlas, envisaged as such by Warburg in 1905, had several prefigurations, until the historian initiated its construction in 1924, gave it a name in 1926 and enriched and transformed it permanently until his death in 1929. Over time, it was always within the library, in its successive locations and based on its architectural transformations, that work on the images unfolded, finally leading to an atlas physically arranged around the reading and conference room: an atlas bearing the name of the room in which it was displayed and commented on, Mnemosyne. A publication was planned, the first formal features of which were sketched out, with the provisional drafting of an introduction, but the book did not appear until Warburg’s brutal death in 1929. Mnemosyne is thus a device of mediating a culture that is thought through the image (and in parallel through the book) by means of the development of a material structure of arrangement and exhibition that is constantly reconfigured. It became a kind of museography of images deployed on a series of panels covered with black canvas on which Warburg pinned series of images, until they formed a kind of composite painting. Mnemosyne was, therefore, also a practice: “Warburg, recalls Didi-Huberman (2011, p. 21) [...] hung the images of the atlas with small clips on a black canvas stretched on a frame – thus, a ‘tableau’ – then took or had taken a photograph, thus obtaining a possible ‘table’ or plate of his atlas, following which he could then dismember, destroy the initial ‘painting’, and recreate another to destroy it again”.6 The expographic structure, constantly modified, has expanded to include about 1,000 images deployed on just under 100 panels. That is at least what one might think, because the panels were lost when the library withdrew to London in 1933. The representation we have of Mnemosyne is, therefore, the result of several photographic campaigns covering the successive states of a kind of moving exhibition that gave rise to a documentary presentation in series form (Tardy 2012): an operation performed in the reading room of the library before the transfer, and which shows significant variations in terms of the number and layout of objects. The French edition (Warburg 2012) reproduces the last of these photographic coverages. This is considered to be fairly faithful to the state of the atlas at the time of Warburg’s death.

6 In Didi-Huberman’s analysis, the term “tableau” (a term from art history) refers to a fixed configuration, while the “table” (a term borrowed from Warburg) is the medium that allows for a metamorphosis and setting in motion of this structure.

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Everything seems to place Mnemosyne’s intellectual adventure under the sign of a search for the traces of culture and this is what justifies the fact that most of his commentators resort to this concept, sometimes in reference to Derrida. In any case, the schema of the trace as we have mentioned above – search for indices, temporal schema, presentification of the past, trust in the manifestation – is present at all levels of this elaboration. The progressive and fumbling search for a descriptive title and then a subtitle (after the adoption of the title Mnemosyne) speaks for itself on this point (Recht in Warburg 2012, pp. 32–39). Warburg hesitates, considering in particular “a series of images for the scientific study of culture applied to preformative, antiquizing expressions for a representation of cosmic and human movement in Renaissance Europe”7, the “series of images exploring the function exercised by pre-engraved ancient expressive values in the representation of life in motion in European Renaissance art”8 and, according to another more laconic formula, “ghost stories for adults”9. In effect, “personal knowledge is when we struggle with legions of ghosts and look at the living as if they were ghosts” (Warburg 2012, p. 8). Finally, the last retained version of the introduction would adopt – most probably provisionally – the following wording: “Based on this iconographic material, the reproductions of which make up the present atlas, Mnémosyne proposes above all an inventory of the ancient prefigurations that contributed, during the Renaissance period, to forging the style of representation of life in motion”10. The concrete components of the project confirm this kind of dialogue between the atlas and the trace schema. Warburg’s investigation focuses on the survival of forms (and not only their influence), the active role of gestures and leitmotiv that were created in other times as active realities in the development of evolving forms. The atlas, thus, presents, through its material organization, a collection of past objects. “Warburg and his collaborators examine the specificities of each domain of the mind

7 Quote and translation by Roland Recht (in Warburg 2012, p. 39). 8 Our translation. Cited by Johnson (2012, p. 20): “Bilderreihe zur Untersuchung der Funktion vorgeprägter antiker ausdruckwerte bei der Darstellung bewegten Lebens in der Kunst des europäischen Renaissance”. 9 Cited by Didi-Huberman (2011, p. 71): “Gespentergeschichte für Ganz Erwachsene”. The expression inspired the title of a book dedicated to Mnemosyne (Bauerle 1988) and that of an exhibition designed in tribute to Warburg (Didi-Huberman, Gisinger 2012), which was then presented in a renewed version under the title Nouvelles histoires de fantômes at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2014. 10 Translation by Sacha Zilberfarb (Warburg 2012, p. 54). “The ‘Mnemosyne’ initially wishes in its pictorial material basis, which the enclosed atlas characterizes in reproductions, to be only an inventory of the antiquizing prefigurations which influenced the portrayal of life in movement in the age of the Renaissance”.

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in order to reactivate them, in a way, within other contexts” (Recht in Warburg 2012, p. 16). It is, therefore, the very arrangement of these objects that aims to make present before our eyes – and above all those of the theorist – the link that they may retain, as products of different periods and contexts, between themselves and with our own present. In other words, Mnemosyne assumes by its very existence that specific knowledge about the history of forms may arise from their presence and exposure to the gaze, without the need for verbal commentary other than very laconic captions to intervene in this manifestation11. Finally, even if the term trace does not constitute a concept in Warburg’s thought, as he delivers it to us in his texts, it plays a very important role in the debates surrounding his project and is constantly taken up by commentators, starting with Fritz Saxl who administered the library and supported, preserved and extended Warburg’s work. A sentence from one of the historian’s biographers, Philippe-Alain Michaud, perfectly summarizes this set of observations: “Art history has the power to draw from the darkness of the past the men whose art and archives have left us traces. By using written and visual sources no longer merely to know personally, but to reproduce the past, the researcher is changing the very nature of historical inquiry” (Michaud 1998, p. 90). Many commentators on the project describe it as anachronistic, not to criticize it, but to underline the audacity of the gesture of a historian who aims to connect objects belonging to different temporal contexts12. Now, etymologically, anachronism is a step back in time: a return to what was. To clarify this confrontation with the schema of the trace, we start, here, from the fact that Warburg builds a material device that he in a way embodies his thought in space and objects. We follow Maud Hagelstein (2008) on this point: “Each researcher, on his own scale could explain what motivates them to group the texts on which they work. In the privacy of their offices, theorists favor, among books, groupings that correspond to the work of the moment, to the argument they think they are deploying in an article, etc. Warburg’s originality (or madness) is that he wanted to extend this subjective principle to an entire library.” 11 This withdrawal of language, which was initially omnipresent in the conference, triggers a major transformation of the status of the image in the atlas form. Recht recalls that before acquiring their autonomy as an atlas, the panels were designed as supports for speakers’ words. 12 “The atlas is an anachronistic object in that heterogeneous times always work together in it: ‘reading before all’ with ‘reading after all’, as I said, but also, for example, the technical reproducibility of the photographic age with the oldest uses of this domestic object called a ‘table.’” (Didi-Huberman 2011, pp. 17–18).

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The atlas is indeed, traditionally, a form linked to a type of medium: what I call a specific media/text complex (Jeanneret 2008, pp. 158–163). The library itself is a spatial organization that makes the book collection readable and manipulable and thus constitutes its text in a way (Damien 1995; Jacob and Baratin 1996). The coupling of the library and the atlas, placed under the common patronage of Mnemosyne, constitutes a device for mediatization of books and images that creates an original type of relationship between medium, forms and works. It gathers objects that are themselves texts, in the sense given above to this term: mainly, but not exclusively, books on the one hand; mainly, but not exclusively, reproductions of graphic works on the other hand. These two arrangements meet three main criteria: spatial deployment, manipulation and exposition. By diverting Davallon’s analysis of the museum exhibition (Davallon 1999, pp. 227–253), we can say that the image atlas and the Mnemosyne library are archaeomedia: assemblages of objects that do not belong to a single technological medium, such as books or television, but which are constituted in media and text by their assembly itself, and under the eyes of a visitor. In fact, the text13 of these devices is not only the objects they collect (books, images) but also the space built to bring them together and make them be seen and read together. I would also suggest that it is the same sources that underpin the theory of the written image in the sense of Christin (1995) mentioned in section 3.4.1. It is indeed the play across media, intervals, figures and spaces that carries the signifying force of these devices14. In particular, the image atlas, read based on this theory, appears 13 “Text” as defined above. This concept is based on my interpretation; it would not have been attractive to Warburg. In his manuscripts, he gives importance to the different substances of concrete objects, bringing together books, on the one hand, and images, on the other hand, and frequently refers to an opposition/tension between the two poles of image/imaginary/dionysiac and language/rationality/apollonian. Warburg does not describe images as texts, because this term refers to verbal objects for him. The term is, therefore here, mine, in relation to what was initially specified in this chapter and according to an explicitly instrumentalized use of Mnemosyne for an info-communicational problem. This choice, which necessarily opens me up to the criticism of infidelity to Warburg’s thought, corresponds to the postulate that taking up the categories mobilized by Warburg in his texts is not the best way to analyze the device dimension of his project of image mediation. 14 The atlas is not writing, since it does not display language. However, the foundations of writing theory (screen thinking, media, intervals, silent partner) do refer for Christin to broader anthropological data about the image. The connection I suggest, here, may seem surprising or forced; it draws some plausibility from Warburg’s decision to place on the very first plate of the Mnemosyne (Warburg 2012, p. 71) a series of Babylonian and Etruscan representations of sheep’s livers for divinatory use, objects which Christin (see section 3.4.1) believes played a crucial role in the invention of writing. For commentary on this plate, see Didi-Huberman (2011, pp. 22–33). It can nevertheless be suggested that Didi-Huberman does not choose the best reference for this analysis, because he relies on an author, Jean Bottero, who subjects the invention of writing to pragmatic and economic causes, while Christin refers to theorists who criticize this modernist reading of Sumerian civilization, such as Jean-Marie Durand.

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as a device based on a thought of the screen (Christin 1995, p. 6) and targets a silent partner (Christin 1995, p. 71), the manipulator-viewer whose thought and gesture give force and meaning to the forms produced. Admittedly, the gaze for which this exhibition is performed remains uncertain. It is above all – and perhaps only – the author himself of the device, who constantly becomes its reader. With regard to the library as a whole, the various accounts of the first visit of Cassirer, who said he was afraid of the object itself and said he had to flee it to write his own work (Settis in Baratin and Jacob, pp. 124–128), reinforce this impression. For Settis, “Cassirer immediately understood that he had no choice: either to ignore this library or to submit to its rules” (Settis in Baratin and Jacob, p. 126). It can also be said that the assembly of the images postulates a portrait of the artist as a silent partner of the graphic tradition based on which its originality stands out. In any case, in the Warburg project, the object is destined to become a kind of “theoretical laboratory” (Johnson 2012, p. 76) for an entire community, mobilizing the considerable resources of a family of financiers, operating using several collaborators and welcoming both scholars and the public. It is indeed through the work of building this very peculiar media-text complex that makes possible the particular investigation that the historian undertakes on the forms of creation. It is not a question of identifying a period, a work or a content, but living and reborn forms. However, these forms are not empirically visible as such in any of the objects taken in isolation; they are related to the way in which space is constructed, the interplay of surfaces and intervals and the screen thinking that the atlas allows. It is this deployment that makes them visible and practical. The empirical substrate of the analysis, the text in the empirical sense of the term (Badir 2012), is therefore the forms, which do not exist in any particular work that is displayed, but in the media/text complex of visibility and manipulation of objects. This construction of a research object through the construction of a media device is deliberate: “Very early on Warburg perceived the scope of the documentary work required by his theoretical project. Therefore, his activity required special logistical arrangements. He needed space, sufficiently large work tables, allowing him to constantly have the collected material at hand” (Hagelstein 2009, p. 93). Michaud also quotes a letter from Warburg to his brother – for biographical reasons, the financier of the enterprise – whose logistical nature is obvious: “The novelty of my method”, Aby wrote to Max, “is that, to reflect the psychology of artistic creation, I collect documents from the field of language as well as the visual arts or the world of religious drama. To achieve this, I and my fellow researchers must have the documents in

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front of us, that is, the books and images placed on large tables so that we can compare them, and these books and images must be easily and instantly at hand. So I need a real arena with tables in order to have the frequently-used books and iconographic material to hand” (quoted by Michaud 2008, p. 230). With regard to the atlas, since the challenge is to “understand the interplay of possible relationships between images” (Hagelstein 2009, p. 92), the theoretical and problematic basis of research is inseparable from the material construction of the device of image mediatization. As suggested by Bonaccorsi, who used the elucidation of the Warburg approach to construct his own mediatization of an iconography of the contemporary screen (see section 4.1.3), “the abundant and cultivated precision of the art historian’s analyses is remarkable in that it holds together thought and formal devices, documentation and knowledge” (Bonaccorsi 2012, p. 87). In other words, through this documentary and expositional gesture, Warburg creates what he himself calls a “space of thought”, this “place where every man positions himself in relation to the images that surround him” (Hagelstein 2009, p. 106). Defining the atlas as the way to create an “embracing gaze”, Didi Huberman suggests: “[that] it is based on the primordial intuition that a regulated redistribution, a new presentation or a problematized reassembly of the materials accumulated during thirty years of scholarly research were capable, in Warburg’s eyes, of delivering a hitherto unnoticed heuristic fertility, a true renewal of his ‘space of thought’, of his entire Denkraum” (Didi-Huberman 2011, p. 255). This construction consists of a form of presentification of history as well as of historical work: in the library and before the panels, the gestures of collection, fragmentation and arrangement that actualize the exploration of the space of thought of artists of the past indissociably create the sensory and intellectual space of this very exploration, here and now. A tight dialectic thus unites the gesture of construction of the device with its theoretical presuppositions, in particular the desire to set forms in motion, to energize them through their confrontation: “To reveal the decisive transformations that artists undertake from traditional forms, what could be more appropriate than a gigantic visual juxtaposition of the motifs of art history? With the Mnemosyne Atlas, the art historian did not therefore wish to constitute a repertoire of fixed canonical forms; on the contrary, his interest was essentially focused on the infinite variation of motifs and on the gaps (or ‘disfigurations’) implied by the phenomenon of ‘survival’ of forms” (Hagelstein 2009, p. 88).

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An observation on the atlas shared by Didi-Huberman, about the library: “the history of art as an academic discipline was undergoing the test of a regulated disorientation [...] a working library, therefore, but also a library at work” (Didi-Huberman 2002, p. 41). 4.1.2. The trace schema questionned by the atlas of forms The next part of our thinking is once again a matter of presuppositions. It is not a question here of engaging in an exegesis of Warburg’s intentions or positions as an art historian, a choice that would be justified from a disciplinary point of view, if it were not first dictated by a lack of competence. What I propose to do is to examine the creation of Mnemosyne in itself, in its singularity, as a material to consider; to put it another way, to base ourselves on it in order to move forward in problematizing the media creation of the trace. The image atlas, on which we are now focusing, will be seen as an info-communication device which makes documentary mediations and can be described with the methods developed to study this type of device (Couzinet 2009). As a mechanism for mediating and mediatizing information and knowledge, the atlas gives rise to a particularly lively discussion of what it means to treat media production as an index of the deployment of culture in its temporality. It manifests, embodies materially and raises for discussion the series of concrete mediations that make it possible to give an aspect and presence to the past in the present. In other words, the atlas denaturalizes gestures that operate these mediations. This is what makes it precious for questioning everything in our society that contributes, no less powerfully, to the erasure of these gestures. To fully appreciate the problematic force of such an enterprise in terms of media creation of the trace, it is necessary to start from its more general scope in the analysis of the social world. Reflection on the very process of Mnemosyne’s creation can contribute to the epistemology of the anthroposocial sciences. In this respect, the hypothesis I am making here is in line with those of specialists in Warburgian theory. Thus, de Recht (in Warburg 2012, p. 8) states, “through the complexity of the problems that Warburg is led to confront in the face of this immense corpus of images, it is the attention of the human sciences as a whole that he has drawn to his work”. This is not so much due to the theses defended by Warburg as to the discussions that necessarily arise from his practice as a researcher – and that make it impossible to avoid. Didi-Huberman does not think otherwise: “the Warburgian invention may prove less fruitful in positive results than in problematic processes” (Didi-Huberman 1996, p. 149). Quite naturally, I give these proposals a different meaning here due to the fact that I adopt a communicative approach to mediation and mediatization.

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This power of questioning, the ironic virtue, in the philosophical sense of the term (ειρωταν: to question), of the poetics of Mnemosyne in action, is due to two major paradoxes that are linked to each other. The first provocation consists of reversing the canonical schema of the researcher’s career and a fortiori that of the scholar (a category in use at the time of Warburg). To put it caricaturally, here we find a thinker who begins by studying corpora of works to draw a theory from them and ends his career by devoting himself almost exclusively to documentary work, which is usually considered a preparatory task, if not an initiatory stage. The second provocation is well summarized by Hagelstein’s observation quoted above, which I would like to recall here: “in the privacy of their offices, theorists favor, among books, groupings that correspond to the work of the moment, to the argument they think they are deploying in an article, for example, etc. Warburg’s originality (or madness) is that he wanted to extend this subjective principle to an entire library” – and, I would add, to have made it into a media and documentary engineering project, that of the atlas. A paradox that could almost be compared to the episode in Swift’s Gulliver where men carry things on their backs, except that in this case the interpretative process is not denied but somehow spectacularized. It should be added that these two paradoxes do not only concern Warburg’s thinking as an art theorist, but they are literally objects of obsession for the critical and scientific discourse on his work and even the activities of reconstituting the library, as well as the publication and circulation of the atlas. Warburg’s interpreters cannot avoid placing the devices he created at the heart of his space of thought. The Warburg Institute of the University of London sought to find out how the library could survive outside its walls. Mnemosyne’s publishers in bookstores have been constantly bothered about how to define the documents that represent it and the editorial choices of their publication. Indeed, it is much more delicate and uncertain to publish an attempt to create a device that is dispersed between the configuration of objects, photographs taken at various times, fragments of unedited but duly preserved texts that concern it, than a set of books, texts or even “speeches and writings”. This constant interference between Warburg’s discourse, his activity as a documentary engineer, his commentators and his editors has never ceased to occupy (parasitically?) his scientific status. The temporality of the publications and their format in a way materialize the difficulty of the history of art and the anthroposocial sciences in the face of a scientific and/or aesthetic and/or media object that escapes them. Many interpretations of the Mnemosyne atlas appeared before it was published in France and the different ways of publishing it in several languages necessarily lead to the same device being given a different shape, if only by the choices made in space and time of photographs and writings that seem to browse through the reality of the atlas. The editorial enunciation (Souchier 1998), which gives to be seen and read, in book form, an atlas constructed and practiced as a place, has only manifested and redoubled, through gaps and metamorphoses, the elusive nature of a knowledge system that escaped any homogeneous, stable and global representation.

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These few considerations on the singularity of a device are not enough to define the theoretical scope of the Mnemosyne atlas, but they do highlight three crucial questions for contemporary trace engineering. First, Warburg’s intellectual adventure – like Benjamin’s – makes it possible to never close the question of collecting and organizing the concrete objects of a research project. Indeed, the atlas exposes, exhibits and even lays out before our eyes the implementation of the complex mediations by which research grasps the empirical reality to which it relates: a set of operations that the schema of the trace tends precisely to conceal in its claim to show the real. This is why analysis and discussion of this media and documentary mechanism are likely to highlight a currently crucial divide in anthroposocial sciences. Mnemosyne operates in this respect as a third object exposing claims to rigor and rationality, in that it pronounces a certain “praise of madness” in science. Some disciplines consider the construction of observables and the delimitation of their collection as a preliminary moment to the research itself. Others, or the same, establish a principle of homogeneity and exhaustiveness in the construction of these sets, and make these principles the criteria of a corpus. These two points of view are represented in ICS as in other disciplines, but they have ceased to occupy the position of canonical methodological requirements in this discipline. A growing number of research projects are based on the principle of interdependence between the gesture of collection of objects and that of their interpretation: precisely that which Mnemosyne, like the Arcades Project, particularly embodies. This has several very important consequences. For example, the analysis of mediations depends on the way in which researchers trace a path through the observables and, for this reason, on the mediations they themselves construct (Bonaccorsi and Labelle 2004). In this context, the creation of situations and the collection of objects are both a practical and theoretical experience that involves the participation of researchers in social life (Le Marec 2002); construction of the documentary space is not a propaedeutic to research, but an integral part of the theoretical stance (Seurrat et al. 2014). Finally, “the constitution of corpora constitutes so many operations of selection which, as a backwash, shift the contours of the object of research” (Bonaccorsi 2012, p. 79). These are some aspects of an intense debate in the anthroposocial sciences, which has not always developed with reference to Mnemosyne, but which the physical existence of the atlas helps to direct. On the other hand, the fact that research is focused on forms – and not, as in contemporary trace engineering, on content or data – means that the indexicality of the trace is definitely problematic. The collection of objects based on relationships of form is one way of constructing the “interpretative aggregates” that are essential for the deployment of the trace (Leleu-Merviel 2018). The atlas is, therefore, a device for producing such aggregates. However, the principle of this aggregation is special.

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The collection of texts is intended to be a figure of culture constructed not from content but from forms of expression. The Warburgian concept of Pathosformel (form of the pathos) includes essential aspects that info-communicational analysis of devices is not able to take into account: for example, the particular context of the Renaissance period, the emotional content of the images, the importance of the body in the images chosen and the interpretative framework of human’s anxiety about the world. However, for a fine connoisseur of Greek culture such as the Renaissance philologisthistorian, the term pathos clearly refers to Aristotle, and through him to what images do to us, to the way we receive them and appropriate them and above all to the construction of a shared space of values (Soulez in Jeanneret and Ollivier 2004, pp. 89–95). As we have seen above, in Warburg, heritage is brought back to life, and it lives again because of the work on it. Forms are present as perceived, tested, received, reappropriated forms. The atlas is a machine to manifest and produce transformations. The various commentators underline this dynamic and metamorphic character of the forms. “Warburg understood well that thought is a matter, not of found forms but of forms in transformation” (Didi-Huberman 2011, p. 22). Hagelstein, who pays particular attention to gaps and displacements, observes that Mnémosyne aims to “reveal the decisive transformations that artists create on the basis of traditional forms” (Hagesltein 2009, p. 88). Finally, it can be observed that the Warburg device-approach questions, or even threatens, the main concepts on which trace analysis is usually based. We will linger here, for example, on three components of the trace schema: the temporal aspect of the trace, its figuration and its indexicality. Comparing Warburg’s approach with Foucault’s, Hagelstein (2009, p. 94) observes that “the ‘memory’ evoked by Warburg is an active memory, which works on past documents rather than collecting them”. A living archive. To put it another way, Mnemosyne’s memory is not of the order of recording because it is poetic, oriented towards the past, like the trace, it looks to the future, as a transformation of the past. The atlas, therefore, works on metamorphoses and not on instituted meanings. It is a question of “revealing, through repetitions but also through gaps, the decisive transformations that artists make of traditional forms” (Hagesltein 2009, p. 88). Presentation of a creative history based on construction of the atlas as a medium and a form: “Not only can Mnemosyne be considered as a driving force for the historian’s inventiveness [...], but the Atlas above all shows the exercize of the artists’ own inventiveness. Indeed, through the arrangement of documents, Warburg reconstitutes a space of formal creation, a space of critical and inventive recovery of forms from the past by artists. It shows that artists never take up ancient motifs without investing them with new meaning” (Hagelstein 2009, pp. 105–106).

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The concrete figuration of the trace is dependent on this determining goal of the form. In this respect, Warburg’s vocabulary leaves great latitude to exegetes of his theoretical work through its systematically figurative and metaphorical character, as well as by virtue of the latitude offered by translation to concretize this or that privileged meaning. Many commentators are keen to retain translations such as “imprint” or “impression” because their interpretative horizon is oriented towards psychoanalysis, neurophysiology or grammatology. For an ICS researcher, it may be more interesting to pay attention to the content of the metaphors and, in a way, to take them “literally”. For example, the terms Prägung/Prägewerk and Ausdruck/Eindruck have a concrete meaning, given by dictionaries, which refers to the material production of forms. The first evokes engraving (Dürer’s art), a technique that embodies in a particular way the coupling of the graphic gesture and the device of inscription , as we have observed its metamorphoses (section 3.2). The second belongs to a founding technique for cultural industries, printing (the art of the “Gutenberg galaxy”). In either case, it is a question of inscription, but it is not just a trace, but a trace and a form. These roots are preserved to designate processes related to social memory and the practical and aesthetic appropriation of forms, such as Vorprägung (prefiguration). I would like to quote at some length Johnson’s analysis of the engraving metaphor, because it shows very well, in my opinion, the deviation or supplement introduced by the choice of this image compared to that of the trace: “In the first instance a technical term describing the process of stamping or embossing metal, Prägung in Warburg’s hands is consistently used to figure the fundamental artistic act by which originary events, expressive gestures, and volatile passions are transformed into aesthetic forms such that they are available for imitation and transmission. Thus, it is an act mediating between the phenomenal and ontological realms, between the extremes of fluxis and statis. A Prägung resembles how metaphor combines the proper and the improper, and then from such combinations forges new, surprising meanings. Vorprägen may also have temporal connotations; it can be translated as ‘to anticipate’ as well as ‘to pre-stamp’” (Johnson 2012, p. 21). What interests us in this dialectic between a material device and a theoretical approach is the way in which the convocation of the schema of the trace gradually moves away from a purely logistical or indexical reasoning. The collection of objects does not seek to reduce creation to the gesture of inscription or the conditions of its production, but to present the historical movement of heritage and the transformation of forms. As Didi-Huberman (2001, p. 4) writes:

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“[...] one would be wrong to look heavily into Warburgian anthropology for a description of ‘origins’ understood as the pure ‘sources’ of their subsequent destinies. The ‘original words’ exist only as survivors: i.e. impure, masked, contaminated, transformed, or even antithetically reversed”15. Warburg never stopped returning to and transforming the organization of his library, like the layout of the images in his atlas. This was imagined, like other material forms, to allow the “non-schematic montage, constantly under construction, never fixed, of a considerable and, rightly, infinite corpus of images” (Didi-Huberman 2001, p. 1). The work on forms postulates an indexicality of cultural objects, in the sense that a link of transmission and appropriation is sought in the present as a sign of the temporal construction of a heritage. However, indexical interpretation does not return from a text to a cause. It moves in the space of the text or rather in the heterogeneity of the texts. Didi-Huberman’s analysis of research on Florentine portraiture has the heuristic advantage of formulating this alternative in a particularly clearcut way – which is probably not without some simplification. It is of interest to me particularly, here, in that it allows me to identify very clearly the epistemic challenge of the regime of trace in personal knowledge. Observing that Warburg explicitly uses in his notes the schema of the index (clue) and the detective, well before Ginszburg (1989), he wishes to distinguish the very different use of this same notion: “Thus, the usual reading that privileges the triumphant results of ‘detective work’ is overlaid with another reading, more attentive to the processes or movements of thought, and from which emerges the feeling of a constant debate, of risk-taking of an eminently philosophical order” (Didi-Huberman 1996, p. 152). Thus, far from tracking down a prey, “a knowledge that evaluates everything it loses at each stage of what it gains, a personal knowledge that reproblematizes and questions each solution, each answer it may have given” (Didi-Huberman 1996, p. 154). Didi-Huberman builds upon this the theoretical opposition between two conceptions of indexicality, which he calls “signal index” and “symptom index”, attributing to Ginzburg the first and to Warburg the second. I quote at some length the conclusion of this analysis, which will be decisive for the analysis of contemporary instrumentalizations of the trace – even if in this case it does not avoid 15 I could write that Warburg has in mind the trivial (everyday) life of forms, but the opposite is true. His project theoretically sheds light on the processes that I have worked to describe as triviality and to define better their nature.

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caricaturing Ginzburg somewhat, as we will see later, and that its analysis focuses rather on the commonplace and dominant conceptions of the “index paradigm”: “Warburg went beyond and displaced the positivist tone that analysis itself, as factual and archival history, might spontaneously take. Anthropological considerations required that use of the index to focus and identify – let us call it the signal-index – be ‘open’ and problematized by a complex centrifugal thought of ‘survival’ and structure, which we might now call a thought of the symptom-index. Signalling entails a strong sign; it eliminates equivocations; it only refers to facts; even the proper names it identifies are always used to establish and deduce facts; that is why it provides a preferred weapon – an epistemological model – for detectives, experts and positivist historians of all kinds. The symptom, on the other hand, is a ‘weak’ sign, in the sense that it offers no certainty, either in its meaning or even in its own manifestation; it is labile, arising where it is not expected, offering unmeasurable intensities, half hidden visibilities, always equivocal, always irreducible to objective facts” (Didi-Huberman 1996, p. 157). In short, if we follow Didi-Huberman, with the poetics of Mnemosyne Warburg invented “a method capable of manipulating as interpretant objects the very images that first constituted his objects of interpretation” (Didi-Huberman 2011, p. 260). Finally, I would like to suggest on this basis a re-reading of Derrida that differs in every respect from that of Ferraris. Indeed, beginning from the underlying assumption that everything is a trace, i.e. we are never the origin of our own thinking, it is not fatal if we take up the project to try to know what the trace is the trace of. According to Derrida, moreover, this quest is illusory, since there is no origin that is not already a continuation. It can be said that Warburg’s work on form mobilizes a schema of the trace without a genesis. The Warburgian trace, the engraving, has the value of a trace in the sense that it is turned towards the fertility of what was, but it is not a trace of. It neither inscribes nor records an act or reality. It sets in motion circulating forms. It does not leave the world of text – as a material object – but constantly works on its forms and challenges. Of course, this opposition between trace and trace of – between engraving and inscription – is very topical. Indeed, contemporary industrial traceability systems overwhelmingly meet the objective of transforming any textual form into signaling indices, by burying the trail under the tracking of indices. Mnemosyne’s experience reminds us that there is nothing fatal or natural about the fact that the purpose of inscription engineering is to track down human practices; it can operate in the poetic mode of opening up possibilities.

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Figure 4.2. Frontispiece of the Encyclopedia. Engraving by Bonaventure-Louis Prévost after a drawing by Charles-Nicolas Cochin, 1765

4.1.3. The poetics of Mnemosyne at work in media analysis I would like to conclude this development by reflecting on how the poetics of Mnemosyne, as it has just been explored, can play a revealing and stimulating role in the contemporary analysis of media in the ICS. I will take three examples: mobilization of the concept of form in the analysis of media images; the weight of the documentary device in the investigation of representations and the construction of an editorial form inspired by Mnemosyne’s model. In each case, it will be a question of seeing how Warburg’s media practice suggests and also how current

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research, like all the productions studied by Warburg, enacts an appropriationtransformation of this system. Let me first take as a first example an analysis that I carried out a quarter of a century ago, because work on Mnemosyne has recently led me to review it critically and to give it a new scientific meaning. As part of extensive research on popularization, I had built up a collection of images from various publications to show the richness of the imaginaries mobilized by science and scientificity (Jeanneret 1994). The series thus constituted brings together images of different statuses, periods and media. What organizes them is the identification of formal categories that give structure to the article: motif, emblems, matrices, chimeras. On these points, the undertaking is similar to that of Warburg, with only the – important – difference that the very process of constituting this corpus is not discussed. I come back, here, to one of these images, the frontispiece designed by Bonaventure-Louis Prévost for the 1751 edition of the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert, which I had chosen as a typical case of an emblematic function of the image in science. At the time, I had not identified the importance of the Mnemosyne atlas, but the proposed approach to visual forms seems to me, a posteriori, similar to that of Warburg. Indeed, it is the work of forms, different in the allegorical engraving (Prägewerk) from what it is, for example, in the table of knowledge (“figurative system”), that holds my attention: formal constraints of deployment in space, condensation of entities into figures, the place of metonymic gestures, semantics of verticality, etc. This is what allows me to suggest that “it is indeed another discourse, perhaps less controlled, more clearly marked by the social world values of the time, which is offered to us by the allegorical scene. The frontispiece gives us a distinct reading of the encyclopedic enterprise’s discursive programme” (Jeanneret 1994, p. 66). It is not surprising that in this process, I came to invoke a certain figure of cultural persistence, the privilege given to form and trail leading again to an anachronistic hypothesis: “The meaning of this scene is not entirely contained in the difficulties of exposing a personal knowledge system. Every image is structured, as much by the information it transmits as by the formal techniques which it borrows from tradition. Likewise, the allegorical scene can be read quite differently, based on its aesthetic, which surprisingly reproduces, as if by quotation, the visual rhetoric of religious paintings” (Jeanneret 1994, p. 68). I therefore made an inventory of formal similarities between the frontispiece and a model of religious painting, drawing in fact from my memory as a visitor to

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museums and churches faced with a large number of religious paintings and, in particular, with ascensions and assumptions: verticality of the ordering of figures; formations of groups and the play of gazes; lines of composition; diffusion of light in clouds and darkness which “gives the composition its centre, not geometric but energetic”; the gesture of ecstasy; etc. Anyway, I was performing Pathosformeln there without knowing it. The model of which I was thinking at the time was, rather than Mnemosyne, Barthes’ Mythologies, which proposed a similar “anachronistic” study on the “iconography of Abbé Pierre” (Barthes 2002 [1957], I, pp. 711–713). In addition, just as Barthes read in the repetition of the features of the iconography of St. Francis of Assisi the abandonment of justice for the benefit of charity, as an apprentice peremptory mythologist, I concluded: “In this case, the frontispiece of The Encyclopedia tells us, through the rhetoric of the image, the mystical recuperation to which rationalism may be subject when it is triumphant” (Jeanneret 1994, p. 68). This formal demonstration still seems convincing to me today. It seems to me that the use of a certain objective anachronism leads to a real formal kinship and suggests the existence of an aesthetic heritage. It is also the same type of analysis that has made it possible to identify heritage in the page on screen (Souchier 1999) and to give importance to the transformation of technological fields without denying semiotic filiations (Jeanneret 2008b). This heritage of forms has led to an approach to forms of writing on screen, not as a totally new world, but as a set of metaforms ensuring a re-appropriation of the social memory of forms (Jeanneret and Labelle 2004), and to observing the paradoxical way in which standardization, miniaturization and segmentation of metaphors have led to a dismantling of the textual form from which they come (Candel et al. in Davallon 2012). However, I would be very hesitant to formulate today such a peremptory and deterministic conclusion on the mystical recuperation of rationalism. The review of this study (as well as those of Barthes) with the mediation of Mnemosyne invites me to focus on processes to which I paid little attention at the time, and above all leads me to express an essential uncertainty for current research. First, the construction of the object of analysis does not appear in the article, and yet it is a major component of semiological work. The study of the form of a particular engraving is not performed only within the document (in the terms of the epoch, immanence) or with reference to external (contextual) data. It is based on the creation of a documentary device that collects texts, the collection of which comes from three processes: the intertextual journey of the corpus of the Encyclopedia; the experience acquired from religious paintings and engravings; and anthologies16 of 16 I owe to discussions with Pauline Chasseray-Peraldi during the writing of her doctoral thesis on epiphanic devices the identification of the importance of clarifying the role of

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already constituted texts and images (art books, manuals, selected pieces) that I encountered as a school pupil, student and teacher. In short, an incorporated corpus of representations of pathos that must actually be defined as the current thinking space of a late 20th-Century literature student. This intertextual set is very similar to what could have been a Warburg plate by the same token. From this point on, this article – like Barthes’ article on advertising for Panzani – enters into an inevitable logic of research, which Bonaccorsi calls the “logic of exemplarization”: “[a] work of selection and extraction, which leads to choosing the ‘good example’ over others, for the purpose of scientific publication and communication. However, it is certain that this timely, occasional ‘good example’ will be the subject of a real crystallization: this exemplary image will be repeated on several occasions (in a course, another communication) and the commentary (the narrative) associated with it, repeated” (Bonaccorsi 2012, p. 84). This I did not fail to do. On the other hand, the role played by formal analysis in the demonstration and its theoretical status could be more clearly taken into account. Admittedly, the use of religious painting can be considered as an index or even a symptom of a religious component of the Enlightenment ideal, or in any case of its content of belief, beyond the claim to free oneself from both. However, the most important thing is undoubtedly that, if this engraving is the trace of something, it is not mainly the trace of an act, but that of a social memory of forms. This is because these, and the layout that embodies them from century to century, represent the permanence of a device of representation. In this respect, the particular interest of the network of images brought together is its ability to undo and redistribute the categorizations of objects: that which gives order to groupings, and thus informs analyses, is not a typology of discourses (political, scientific, religious), but the identification of structures that cross institutional classifications. In addition, to conclude – and this is what seems essential to me today when I reread such texts – the example of this analysis makes visible the importance of a reflexive relationship to the idea of an index in culture and the use of indexical inquiry into the cultural product (Colombo in Colombo and Eugeni 2007, pp. 355– 377). Everything is at play in the way in which the interpretation of these series of images is adjusted. Establishing the formal kinship of the trails makes it possible to anthologies of images and texts produced by previous authors in the constitution of the research object.

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postulate a persistence of forms, and thus to reject a simple explanation of the works by actions or the situation. This does not necessarily authorize, however, diagnosing on this basis an ideological posture or a historical destiny, and a fortiori a determination of the new by the old, a causality of the past acting in the present, on the basis of the naturalized index. The second example of a communicative appropriation of the poetics of Mnemosyne concerns the way in which documentary methodology can be requalified in terms of creating a space of thought in the particular context of research on communication processes. Bonaccorsi’s investigation into the phantasmagoria of the screen (2012) has already been mentioned above for what it reveals about the social and media construction of figures of the gesture of writing/reading (section 3.2.3). However, the elaboration of the very space of this research, which shares with that of Warburg a focus on heterogeneous sets of images, requires the creation of a documentary device that Bonaccorsi explicitly associates with the Mnémosyne image atlas, as in Benjamin’s Arcades Project. The aim here is to resume this effort of clarification and, if possible, to extend it on the basis of the precise description of the devices described above. As we have just seen, the choice to construct a research project as a set of documentary operations (collection, selection, classification, distribution of objects) and as a media space for the exhibition of images makes visible and debatable the link between the construction of documentary aggregates (Leleu-Merviel 2017, pp. 121–150) and the definition of an epistemological posture. It is precisely one of the originalities of Bonaccorsi’s research to have brought to a new level of explanation this dialectic between a documentary work and a question in the specific forms it takes with regard to images, in his Fantasmagoria of the Screen. Borrowing an expression from Didi-Huberman, we can say that she theorizes what is really a problematized remontage (“re-editing”). This is what makes it possible, here, to highlight a theoretical and practical legacy of the Mnemosyne atlas – more precisely its value of problematization – and at the same time to highlight what the reformulation of these questions within the framework of an info-communication analysis brings, in a movement of recovery and shift that precisely characterizes the dynamics of thought for Warburg, but at the cost of taking a distance from certain stances of art history as mobilized by Mnemosyne (library and atlas). Bonaccorsi takes the risk of refusing the easy path of creating corpora of images by cutting them off from the contexts in which they are visible to make them into abstract objects and isolated entities. This choice introduces, with regard to current uses of the image, a shift that consists of moving from “the corpus to editing” (Bonaccorsi 2012, pp. 71–79). Drawing on the example of Mnemosyne, as well as on the reflexive analyses of several historians and anthropologists on the limits of the notion of corpus, Bonaccorsi intends, like them, to “bring together two periods

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of research: that of ‘collection’ and that of ‘analysis’” (Bonaccorsi 2012, p. 80). In other words, Bonaccorsi cannot theorize the public status of images (in this case the computer screen and its practices) without theorizing her own archival work: creating series, producing encounters, constituting new groups, stabilizing them. This research does not strictly speaking mobilize the schema of the trace, insofar as its space of relevance is contemporary and it does not seek to track causalities (which does not exclude an archaeology of the public image in the 19th Century that can be compared to Warburg’s investigation). However, the problematization of the very act of constituting the observable, and the insistence on the epistemological content of the material device of image manipulation and on the poetic content of research, open up a theoretical discussion with Mnemosyne. The intellectual gesture is, therefore, inseparable from a material practice of images. This explains why the researcher describes the construction of her research object in terms that recall Cassirer’s or Saxl’s accounts of Warburg’s work in his library. Bonaccorsi refers to her research process in these terms: “It is a matter of the ‘fixations’ that we perform [...] in a gesture of choosing the image (it is, in a way, ‘chosen’ to become an archive) and of designation (the researcher documents it, indexes it according to their own criteria of coding and referencing) [...] these operations of choice and designation (such as that which, by freezing on an image, takes a fragment of the film) amount to again producing representations of representations” (Bonaccorsi 2012, p. 83). The awareness that research not only analyzes images but transforms them leads Bonaccorsi to discuss materiality and visuality in particular, not only of the images she studies but of her own analytical work. In this way, she naturally comes to place the notion of table/plane at the heart of her method. “The planar dimension of the still image constitutes for iconographic thought the fundamental interest of working according to a poetics of affinity and encounter. Creating an encounter between images by arranging them in plates: it is a question of describing a practice of space and the gaze” (Bonaccorsi 2012, p. 86). This approach is based not only, nor even perhaps mainly, on the study of Mnemosyne but also on a long-term reflection (Bonaccorsi and Labelle 2004) and is part of a collective dialogue within ICS. However, the reference to the Warburgian enterprise and Didi-Huberman’s analysis of it helps to clarify its scope. Indeed, for Bonaccorsi: “The abundant and cultivated precision of the art historian’s analyses is remarkable in that it holds together thought and formal devices, documentation and personal knowledge. To understand stratifications of forms, coexistence of times within an image is to take literally the fact that ‘every social and historical object constitutes itself

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as a montage’ (Didi-Huberman 2011b, p. 94)17 and to unpack the documentary status of the image” (Bonaccorsi 2012, p. 87). This analysis finds its logical extension in the creation of a set of “tables presented in [the] essay [which] bring together different regimes of the image, our photographs as well as photograms of commercials and films, posters, videos. They are at work as well as of work. They aim to respond to the ambition to show the images and at the same time the movement of analysis”. It is no less interesting to understand, in conclusion, what quite deeply distinguishes, despite everything, Bonaccorsi’s approach from that of Warburg. To do this, it is useful to return to the series of images handled by the Renaissance historian. The panels reproduced in the photographic survey (Warburg 2012, pp. 63– 189) contain extremely heterogeneous iconographic material, organized, as we have seen above, by formal relationships. A structure is made manifest by the joint exhibition of objects and briefly indicated by synthetic captions and by a classification that reconciles chronology and theme. We can mention, in no particular order, in a list that gives a weak idea of this disparity: old maps drawn from handwritten or printed books of different periods; engravings; photos of statues or paintings taken in museums; an aerial photograph of the port of Ostia; press clippings about Zeppelin flights or a railway accident and agency photographs of the Lateran agreements between Mussolini and Pius XI. However, there is also a map of European cultural exchanges, a family tree, a diagram of the edifice of the world in the Divine Comedy produced by Warburg himself; reproductions of paintings or epigraphic inscriptions included in pages of art books or archaeological studies; the photograph, as a mise en abyme within one of the plates, of an earlier plate produced by Warburg himself on the occasion of a conference or a page of one of his books containing photographs of works. The publication of these plates – or rather photographs of the plates produced during a photographic campaign – required intense, and not always successful, work on the part of the publishers to complete Warburg’s captions, which were usually indifferent to the media, with mention of the sources and sometimes the successive levels of reproduction of the image, to distinguish these captions from those of the author (e.g. by the typographical alternation of bold and italics in the French edition). Bonaccorsi’s insistence on manipulating and producing images of images and representations of representations shows how a specific study of acts of image mediation and mediatization might enrich the analysis of Warburg’s work. Indeed, Warburg “stacks” successive states of images on his plates, which he handles, fragments and above all captures in states that are themselves transformed, decontextualized and recontextualized (Després-Lonnet 2014). In particular, we see 17 Quoted here by Bonaccorsi.

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in action the work of photography, whose power Malraux would measure for a completely different purpose. Malraux himself is often represented handling a large number of images on the floor of his office. The author of the Imaginary Museum writes, in terms that are totally applicable to Mnemosyne: “The album isolates, sometimes to metamorphose (by enlarging), sometimes to discover (to isolate in a Limburg miniature a landscape, to compare it to others, and also to make it a work of new art), sometimes to demonstrate. [...] The sculptures photographed draw from their lighting, their framing, the isolation of their details, a specious modernism, different from the real one, and singularly virulent. [...] The history of art for the last hundred years, as soon as it escapes the specialists, is the history of what can be photographed” (Malraux 2004, I, p. 217). Here, the gap between a cultural history that seeks to reconcile the transcendental and the empirical (Hagelstein 2014) and an analysis of communication processes is obvious. The latter requires critical feedback in the way in which research “organizes, classifies, fragments, constitutes sets of images, defines boundaries and boundaries within other already constituted sets (digitized collections, image banks, physical archives) or which researchers carry out themselves” (Bonaccorsi 2012, p. 78). Hence, Bonaccorsi carefully describes the consequences of the fact that she herself accesses different objects by means of plates that institutions and screen writings make themselves. On the other hand, these mediations do not really interest Warburg as an art historian and in any case they do not seem to have a particular epistemological content for him – nor for most commentators. This clearly indicates that art history and ICS do not have the same “horizon of relevance” (Leleu-Merviel 2018, p. 15). Warburg does not neglect the materiality of images or their medium. However, it seems relevant to him as a moment in the process of exhibiting the image, which must manifest forms that, in his view, are not dependent on the media and vehicles of their inscription and can be abstracted from their overall framework. Analysis of the way in which, in Mnémosyne and in Fantasmagoria of the Screen, the methodological question of the documentary gesture and the devices of its mediation are posed refers us, in turn, to reflections already made as to “the place of documents in the disciplines” and the way in which these hierarchize “form, figure, the represented and the image (in the imaginary sense)” (Bonaccorsi 2012, pp. 76–79). It can be concluded that, if both the art historian and the analyst of communication processes are also aware of the fact that construction of a space of thought is a matter of devices, they cannot, in order to deploy their research, approach it according to the same horizon of relevance.

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The last example I would like to mention has the feature of being a documentary and media innovation in itself. This is the television atlas produced by a group of anthroposocial researchers under the sign of Mnemosyne (Colombo 2010). The material device of editorial mediation offers us the opportunity to see how the poetics of Mnemosyne can inspire media analysis – again with the inevitable gap between an aesthetic approach and a communicative approach. The project, also led by a researcher in communication sciences, Fausto Colombo, in the research laboratory of the Catholic University of Milan and its department of communication and entertainment sciences, has three singularities compared to those just presented. First, it explicitly uses the Mnemosyne atlas as a model, because it is entitled “Traces: a Warburgian atlas of television” (Tracce: atlante warburghiano della televisione). On the other hand, it is the invention of a material object and not only the publication of a text. This object, inspired by Warburg, presents a media structure and a dialectic between material device and specific research problems. Finally, under the scientific direction of an author – like Warburg, an author of the device as much as of the problematic – it is a collective production associating a photographer, Jacopo Benassi, with a team of editors from several disciplines. In the introduction to the Tracce Atlas and in the final methodological note, Colombo affirms Mnemosyne’s model to give it particular relevance in the context of television studies, in which he is an international actor and which he perceives to be struggling with a certain crisis of scientific and critical creativity. After having occupied a paradigmatic position in the communication sciences, television is indeed confronted with a double movement of dissolution. On the one hand, the material object of the screen, which resulted from the metamorphoses of the cathode ray tube, begins to dissolve in the flows of digital data. On the other hand, society has increasingly absorbed television, to the point of making indistinguishable what within it is properly mediatic from what is more generally the culture of a moment in history. The use of the atlas form, clearly inherited from Warburg, is therefore a way to open up and to shift media studies. Colombo’s idea is to think of television “in a broader context that speaks to us of the profound connections between cultural circulation, at the period of television, and other forms of this change, whether past, present or future (even if they are still only visible in embryonic state), by recognizing and showing links, by recovering continuity, while underlining – naturally – the differences and fractures, while being aware that the period of television belongs not only to the media, but more generally to the society that produced and welcomed it and that social change has more than once bent the instrument to its own requirements, influencing its turns and partial metamorphoses” (Colombo 2010, p. 14)18. The aim is to make the crisis in television studies a 18 Our translation from Italian.

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resource for research by integrating “this dilution, this disappearance of the TV medium into a broader investigation of the forms of culture yesterday, today (and perhaps tomorrow)” (Colombo 2010, p. 15). The use of plates, whose heuristic role is recalled by Colombo, is at the service of this problematic shift. It allows “as a step backwards towards the point of origin of certain disciplines that have investigated human culture” (Colombo 2010, p. 14)19. It is, therefore, a question of creating both a temporal step backwards – rightly associated with the schema of the trace – and a space of thought – in this case collective and plural. The device consists of a particular editorial format, governed by a certain form of auctoriality, a scientific problem and an editorial enunciation of the image of the text. The material device of writing is based on the delegation of auctoriality. Colombo, who is called the “curator”, has entrusted each of the nine authors from different disciplines (semiotics, sociology, literary studies, anthropology, technology, journalism, political science) with the task of building a collection of images that will allow us to question in an anachronistic manner (going back in time) these different components of the mediatization of culture today in work in television: “The basic idea was to invite a series of colleagues from different disciplines, interests and ages to get to grips with a guided Warburgian reading – of each theme defined in common – by a collection of images that they intuitively consider essential for illustrating the relationship between television and other media, or, even more fundamentally, other cultural circuits. The project had no ambitions of exhaustiveness, and did not acquire any during its implementation. It is a test, in the original sense of an attempt, a core sampling, a verification” (Colombo 2019, p. 154). Here, we may recognize the poetics of Mnemosyne, at work in this case in a collective production of knowledge. The material construction of the book exhibition seeks to embody this polyphonic exploration of the past in a device of publication – again, textual, documentary and media. Colombo respects, by choice, the dominant material form of the book and its possibilities of reading, consultation and manipulation but puts them at the service of a demonstration of the legacies that are being explored. Indeed, each author deploys a discourse in a research article, while conceiving it as a course through a series of images different in their temporality, their medium, their status. In short, to parody Oulipo, not a logorally, but an iconorally. Television is in 19 It should be noted that Colombo does not claim to trace the origins of the media, but rather to return to the basis of the research, to review it.

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a way the horizon of this journey within a media space-time whose depth and diversity are exposed and deployed, as in Mnemosyne. The material and visual structure of the book, juxtaposing browsing through the pages with observation of the plates, due to a simple but spectacular pamphlet structure, allows the reader – the silent partner – to encounter both the author of a text and the author of a montage. This dispersion of writings and paths is finally organized around a general textual structure. The book addresses the mediatization of culture through three main components: materials, rituals and flows. We will not summarize this extremely dense and rich work here. We will simply indicate why the research coordinator chooses this tripartite structure and show in some examples of what the poetics of forms used by the authors consists. For Colombo, the plan of the book makes it possible to take a historical perspective, to make distinctions between several levels of social memory and to understand how they are redistributed today: “If materials are the condition of perception and rituals the condition of experience the concretization of flows is the condition of cultural action, whether it be productive and ideal on one hand, or cognitive and assimilative on the other hand, because it is precisely what happens in exchanges that constitutes the flows of culture” (Colombo 2010, p. 21, our italics). The work on materials leads to the mobilization of the dialectic between the determining character of artifacts, already present in prehistoric megaliths, and the continuity of phenomena such as luminescence, transparency and translucency, which already obsessed creators of stained glass. As a condition for the possibility of the communicative life of the media, matter “manifests itself on the productive side through a technology and on the reception side through a certain type of perception” (Colombo 2010, p. 16). Hence, for example, the attention paid to the history of surfaces and the history of the frame as a material and symbolic object (Stefanelli in Colombo 2010, pp. 35–39; pp. 41–44) makes it possible to deconstruct the illusion of depth, to the benefit of the identification of forms (which Warburg would undoubtedly have qualified as Pathosformeln) stretching between the two poles of the mirror and the focus (Aroldi in Colombo 2010, pp. 47–50). Rituals, developed in certain spatio-temporal contexts, “constitute the opportunity (high or low, institutional or grassroots, whatever) for an exchange in which what passes from hand to hand is in a way valued as a transmission on the one hand, a welcome on the other hand. It is in the trivium20, in this space of the encounter that what must circulate circulates” (Colombo 2010, p. 18). Hence, the interest, for example, in detaching oneself from a fascination with the so-called digital ubiquity, to study over time the construction of an “experience of not being 20 The term refers to the theory of triviality (Jeanneret 2008a; Jeanneret 2014).

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here”, from Raphael’s paintings to major globalized musical shows (Colombo 2010, pp. 73–76). The study of flows, which mobilize materials through the practices of actors and institutions, makes it possible to explore different ways of creating culture in the implementation of media processes, from the pole of a strong differentiation of the roles embodied by schools, critics and educational television channels to the ideal of an infinite and continuous co-production of culture glorified by cultural studies (Colombo 2010, p. 22). This tension can, for example, be precisely studied if we put the seriography (serial writing) of current commercial television in the perspective of the multiple intermediatic forms of the “narrative in pieces”, from the story of Achilles and Agamemnon to the “formats” of reality TV shows that have triumphed in the “production” industry, since Big Brother/Grande fratello/Loft Story, the program conceived by Endemol (Bellavita in Colombo, pp. 127–130).

Figure 4.3. The editorial device of Tracce. (A Warburgian atlas of television, Link, 2010)

These few indications will not be enough to present the French reader with the Tracce atlas, which is unfortunately not yet translated. I hope that they will be enough, however, at the end of this journey with Mnemosyne, to show her poetics. The exploration of the forms of culture in search of what has been given form and the use of media and documentary innovation to question the depth of cultures are less like a hunt for society through texts than “the reading [...] of the pilgrim [who] leaves [...] traces in the spaces he travels through” (Jacob 2002). The collective of this project claims nothing more than to trace some of the possible routes between forms and stories. It opens up avenues and delivers “landmarks left along the way,

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deliberate or hidden, [which] can guide other readers or serve as signs of recognition for the walker wishing to find their own traces” (Jacob 2002, pp. 16–17). 4.2. Indexical reading of media texts In a direction profoundly alien to the poetics of Mnemosyne, we will now turn our attention to how texts can become, not matrices of creation, but indices of practices and social relations. This approach to media texts considers them not only as forms that circulate and inform the life of the texts themselves, as does the Colombo Tracce Atlas, but claims to read in them the traces of something external to them. To put it more schematically, these are interpretative acts that lead, in a declared and reasoned or invisible and unthought way, to compel texts to testify to the social world, or even to track it down. This is what I call here indexical reading of media texts. Unlike the poetics of Mnemosyne, which cannot be easily calculated – but is nevertheless a major component of computerized media – indexical reading of media texts is omnipresent in the processes of computerized treatment of what are now called traces and personal data (Rochelandet 2010). Let us take a few examples, some of which have already been mentioned in section 1.3. The frequency of exchanges between two correspondents is treated as an index of the intensity of their relationship, or even of their belonging to a community. A request made by a network user to find documents relating to a series of novels may lead to the belief that he or she is a strong reader. The fact that a user talks a lot about a foreign city in his or her exchanges with several interlocutors may indicate that he or she intends to visit it. The frequency of a researcher’s or author’s quotations will be considered a sign of their intellectual importance, etc. The indexical interpretation of texts of all kinds that we produce and exchange is what makes industries prosper, taking advantage of the processing of inscriptions being made increasingly available by the logistics of the written trace (section 3.1) (Pène 2005)21. Indeed, since the latter requires that all acts give rise to the production of texts, the collection and processing of signs makes it possible to segment a population, to offer books for sale or a hotel booking, to publish scientific awards, etc. In each of these cases, inscriptions in the media text are aggregated and their existence is treated as a sign that in “real life” someone is doing, has done or will do something, thinks something, wants something. Seen in this way, branded tools such as Google, Instagram, YouTube and Amazon are less a “search engine”, a “social network”, a “platform” and an “online library” than industries of massive processing of traces of use22. 21 For a more precise analysis of the relationship between the economics of writing and the society of availability, see Jeanneret (2014, pp. 388–405). 22 For an example of this analysis, see Grignon (2012) and Heuguet (2018).

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These indexical handlings of all productions of communication result in an impressive number of procedures that will not be inventoried, here in detail, especially since they constantly change as we analyze them, in search of ever more complete knowledge of our practices and attitudes. We can grant ourselves the means to approach this very complex space of procedures, beliefs and reasoning with elementary theoretical weapons to observe them and understand their implications, beyond more or less well-intentioned statements that justify them or the magical announcements that accompany them. It is the purpose of the brief development presented, here, to identify this conceptual and problematic framework. While automatic procedures for processing inscriptions introduce major transformations in the definition of the media and more broadly of culture and society, the interpretative processes that are in play preceded the arrival of digital technology. The idea that the media convey traces of what people do is in itself quite old, rather banal, and above all largely naturalized. If this idea is gaining importance today, it is not so much because of its novelty as because it is translated into increasingly sophisticated info-communication devices. Any media production can indeed be considered and has long been considered as a reservoir of clues (indices) as to what people do, want and think about culture. This identification of the most essential mediations that lead to the transformation of texts into indices will proceed in three stages. First of all, one can ask globally the question of the reasons why a text can be a witness to something other than itself and what leads to assigning it the status of witness to the social world. Then, the theme of the “indexical paradigm”, which is very often invoked today as a commonplace justification for the treatment of texts as traces, will be re-examined from a return to the texts of its author – its founder of discursivity, to use Foucault’s (1969) expression – the historian Carlo Ginzburg. Finally, we will try to identify some of the transformations that technological instrumentation, particularly statistical and computer instrumentation, has brought to indexical text interpretation in recent decades, by focusing on a limited but particularly strategic process, quotations. 4.2.1. The textual witness as a ferment As we have seen in the history of the book, a sign that reveals a reality is an object linked in one way or another to practices through indexical reasoning. However, what makes different texts into clues (indices)? If we dig deeper, we discover a scenario of practice, a little narrative that gives it its meaning. In this case, here are some narratives that form the basis of those indices mentioned above: people who exchange a lot among themselves belong to the same community; an Internet user who consults information on books wants to buy some; friends who

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talk a lot about Geneva want to go there; an often-quoted author has intellectual authority. Without a narrative that links inscription to practice, there is nothing to indicate anything. Someone who thinks that reputation has nothing to do with authority cannot interpret the frequency of quotations as a sign of intellectual influence. We find here the mode of existence of the trace as a ferment already encountered in section 2.2, and we can specify its meaning in terms of communication processes. The concept of ferment, proposed by Marion with regard to objects that evoke a narrative without being strictly narrative in themselves (1997) and brought to a certain level of generality by Seurrat (2018) for any semiotic stance which initiates or suggests without being explicit, finds particular use here, because it unfolds in a process which is complex – but totally naturalized in most situations. This process consists of the nesting of an indexical ferment, a narrative ferment and a documentary ferment. The feeling that a text is a trace of something is to assume that it is an index, a supposition that is itself based on the suggestion of a narrative and that initiates the transformation of the text into a document that reflects a practice. Considering an object as a trace is, therefore, not quite treating it as a narrative, an index or a document, but it already in a way promises to it a social destiny. To look at this object is to make it a potential document, index and narrative. If we describe this same process from what it produces, we can go through it in the opposite direction: the object considered as a trace – therefore, for example, the text considered as a trace of practice – is documented to become information; it does so to the extent that it is constituted as an index; and it is constituted as an index only when it is integrated, implicitly or explicitly, into a narrative schema and it is under these three conditions (documentation, indexing and narrativization) that a text can create knowledge about a practice – or, in the common terms of sociologists and technologists, become a trace of use. It is, therefore, at the cost of actualizing, explicitly or implicitly, a potential narrative that a collection of inscriptions (a letter, documentary consultations, a quotation) reveals, if the reasoning is correct, clues or indices (of a social affiliation, an interest, a project, an authority). If and only if the reasoning is correct. Indeed, people may exchange letters when they fight with each other, look for bestsellers as part of an economic study of the press, study tourist sites for a semiology course and quote a researcher to make fun of them. The Sokal affair, which was triggered 20 years ago by the publication of a hoax article in a cultural studies journal (Jeanneret 1998), led to an extensive quotation of certain authors whom it permanently discredited. The narratives mentioned above, therefore, fall into the category of plausibility: they seem obvious but are not certain. However, as we know – as Cornelius and Boileau wrote – the truth is not always plausible.

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In such an approach to the text, it is not only a question of considering the media as the index of the practices of which it is the object – as the book would be the index of reading – but all the contents of the media as indices of the social world in which they have been created and disseminated. It is important to understand that this way of dealing with the media is not natural. It is part of a particular relationship to the communication and discourse of others. It is not excessive to say that indexical reading of communication is an ethical stance. The attitude that seems most logical in regard to a text, whatever it may be, and in particular a text conveyed by an industrial medium (a book, a program, a website, a platform) is the one we learn in the classroom in France. This consists of seeking its meaning and understanding the information it presents. We can say that the reader who really reads responds to the question that the text addresses to us as recipients of a process of expression, information and signification. More theoretically, they enter into a communicative act, a form of dialogue that involves considering the other as an alter ego and taking the place of the recipient of a gesture of communication (Habermas 1987), such as understanding, for example, the particular interpretation of the Greek myth in Racine’s play Phèdre and more broadly enter Racine’s universe (Barthes 1963). The indexical inquiry that seeks traces of use in the media proceeds from another point of view. It consists of approaching the texts that circulate in the media, not directly as carriers of ideas, intentions or opinions intended for us and for us to understand, but in a somehow oblique way, as revealing, as means of spying on23 the conditions of their production and the practices, aspirations and commitments of the users who have produced them. For example, the succession of Racine’s plays could be analyzed as a sign of the docility that writers had to show at the royal court and Racine’s exceptional ability to adapt to the vicissitudes of power and changes in cultural norms (Viala 1990). Indexical reading is, therefore, a form of interpretation of media texts that frees itself from the informational and signifying intentions of their authors and audience – and above all frees the person engaging in them from the role of a participant in communication (Jacques 1979). This strategy of reading our exchanges postulates that our texts, because they have been created in a certain context that is supposed to have left traces in their writing, can reveal, even betray, what happened, what we do, what we think, and this unbeknown to us, or in any case independently of our own intentions of communication.

23 We return later (section 4.2.2) to this structuring metaphor in the founding article of the index paradigm (Ginzburg 1989) whose original title contains the Italian word “spie”, which means both “traces” and “spies”.

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This strategy of (non-)reading has long been observed in the industrial world of communication. This occurred – it is important to understand – long before the Internet explosion that gave this type of process a new dimension. The political journalist, turning away from discussing the arguments proposed by a politician, reads in his speech the evidence that certain “elements of language” have been prepared for him; recruitment agencies examine the writing of a letter as an index of a character or an emotional state; opinion research institutes interpret the audience share of a TV programme as an indication of public interest. Or, at least they claim to do so, because there is no evidence that all these deductions are valid: as we have seen (section 2.1), it is one of the essential definitions of indexical reasoning that it can be very informative, or totally misleading. Indeed, the paranoid is the one who interprets all signs as indications that the world revolves around them, and the fact that they are convinced of this and they know how to demonstrate it very well to everyone does not prevent them from being diverted from any lucid relationship with others. This strategy is both a reading and a non-reading strategy, since the text is well taken into account, but not for its actual subject and purpose. This is also the reason why this indexical reasoning applied to media productions can be manipulated and instrumentalized. The literature offers us a very telling example, the epistolary novel Address Unknown (Taylor 2004)24. Betrayed by his friend, whom he had asked for help to save his sister, the exiled Jewish intellectual hero begins to send his correspondent a series of letters full of hints that seem to attest to his fictitious participation in the resistance to Nazism with the aim of causing his death. In the terms used here, the correspondence then switches from a logic of dialogue to an indexical logic. The letter empties itself of its symbolic content as an act of communication involving the link between two men – in a serious moment in their lives when trust is vital in the literal sense – in order to totally obey an indexical logic of stigma of a behavior. The man disappointed in his sincere dialogue decides to use the material medium of correspondence as a means of revenge. It is precisely this changeover, which gradually takes place unbeknown to the character who compromised with the Nazis – and to the greatest surprise of the reader – that constitutes the brilliant invention of the novel. Indeed, what has been the attraction of the epistolary novel since the 18th Century, for Richardson, Laclos or Rousseau, is the desire to express from within the ideas and passions of the characters. Here, on the contrary, what constitutes the source of action is the possibility for an outside observer to consider the material document, the medium if you will, as the trace of a stance, leading the one who has betrayed the symbolic link by compromising with barbarism to be arrested as a defender of the Jews. It is even the certainty that this indexical reading will be practiced by those whose profession 24 Another more benevolent example of the same illusionary game could also be Romain Gary’s mother’s behavior in Promise at Dawn, which consists of post-dating letters in advance so that they are sent and give him the illusion that she is still alive.

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it is, the agents of the Gestapo, which underlies the device of deferred revenge and makes it a communicational time-bomb. If we are careful, this process of reclassifying an inscription as a trace, made visible, here by the spectacular nature of its manipulation, is likely to affect any media production, particularly the products of media industrialization. We will use, here, the example, already given, of a commonplace and ancient document, the tourist guide. A guide is primarily used to provide information to travellers, but the value of this information is based on the assumption that those who wrote this type of document have actually been to the site, that they have documented their interest and that they have conducted an investigation and readings to support their statement with sources. This idea must be shared by readers so that they can trust the publisher. The idea that the guide should record the (enlightened) experiences of its designers is, therefore, not an optional element but a constitutive principle that defines editorial responsibility. The act of editing and writing a guide engages this claim. This was obviously the case when guides were written by an individual author, such as Adolphe Joanne, author of the great French-language guides who, at the end of the 19th Century, prefigured the Guides bleus and who was known to have traveled to all the peaks of the Alps (Devanthéry 2016). The principle remains true in the case of the dominant editorial process today, the collective writing of this type of document by a team of investigative writers who intend to provide reliable information to modern travellers. As such it is possible to use a guide as a revealing guide to the way in which its authors did the journey, their approach, their conception of history and geography, their ideology or otherwise the insufficient, casual, conformist nature of their preliminary investigation. Historians and semiologists alike do not shy away from interpreting guides of different eras as the trace of ideas of national identity, relations to otherness, norms of conduct in society, conventions. In short, as indicators of events, practices, beliefs, cultural values (with an obviously variable degree of reliability). Although tourism analysts point out, as Chartier did for readers of the popular edition, that travellers are far from strictly adhering to the model of themselves offered by these documents (Urbain 1991). It is easy to understand that this reasoning can be applied to any form of media. Hence, Colombo and Eugeni (1996) proposed a more general formulation of this principle by distinguishing two dimensions of any media text: on the one hand, its scope for social testimony, which they call the “testis text” (from Latin for “witness”) and, on the other hand, its role in structuring our world view, which they call the “textum text” (from Latin for “fabric”). Through this dialectic between two sides of the media process, they point out that every document, every media production – every message, if you will – does two things at once: on the one hand, it attests to a practice that has produced it and betrays, if you will, the world in which it was born; on the other hand, it weaves the fabric of our perception of

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reality, the visible, the social world. A tourist guide provides us with tools to structure a space and give a format to our (planned) travel experience, but we can also consider it as a witness to the actual (completed) experience of its authors. In other words, it operates “the inscription of one use in order to anticipate another” (Davallon et al. in Souchier et al. 2003, p. 55). It is this experience inscribed in the content of the edited document that supposedly underlies, by its reality and its authentic and enlightened quality, the claim of publishers to guide us in their steps. It can be said, to simplify but without betraying this research, that the poetics of Mnemosyne particularly reveal the role of textum (fabric, frame, matrix) of the text for the representation of the social world and that indexical reading consists of explaining and setting up its role as a testis (witness, the index, revelation) of practices. Adjusting the relationship between these two dimensions is an essential issue in culture and politics, and hence understanding the dynamics and issues of indexical reading is so important. 4.2.2. The “index paradigm”, from its commonplace life to its heuristic scope The expression index paradigm has become a “formula” in the human sciences among designers of technical devices and in data processing consulting: a fixed expression that can deal with a wide variety of meanings and issues (Krieg-Planque 2009). A kind of “Swiss Army knife” for the justification of traces. In particular, it is often mobilized in the context of statements that observe the passage from sign to trace, announce the potential of digital humanities or Big Data and, more generally, describe a regime of communication that would escape intentionality or interpretation to open up to a kind of indexical crash. In short, the expression index paradigm has become the label of an approach to texts through tracking, recording, drilling into texts25. This discourse, which is found among some historians, sociologists and technologists, almost systematically refers to the same text by the historian entitled in French Traces: racines d’un paradigme indiciaire (“Traces: Roots of an Index Paradigm”). It is the translation of a long article, or if you will, of a short essay, originally published in 1979 under the title “Spie: radici di un paradigma indiziario” (henceforth: Spie), a title that did not begin with the most common Italian word for traces (tracce), which we found in Colombo above, but with the word “spie”, in the author’s words “an ambiguous word that means both indices and spies” (Ginzburg in 25 On this type of extrapolation and its intellectual and political implications, see, for example, Ertzscheid, Gallezot and Simonnot in Barats (2013, pp. 53–68); Merzeau (2013); and Schmitt (2015).

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Thouard 2007, p. 37)26. These defenders of the index paradigm refer to the terms “index” and “trace”, the “paradigm shift” linked to the success of a bestseller in the human sciences (Kuhn 1972) and the power to evoke “perhaps the oldest gesture in the intellectual history of humankind: that of the hunter crouching in the mud scanning the tracks of his prey” (Ginzburg 1989, p. 151). However, this article is extremely complex and it only makes sense in relation to the historian’s ways of working. A review of some of Ginzburg’s texts seems to me to be fruitful for two main reasons. First, it is indexical reasoning and the schema of trace that he puts into play when he uses the expression “index paradigm”. Second, he compares texts of various statuses (programmatic, reflexive, empirical) to make it possible to identify some really essential and thorny scientific questions mobilized by indexical investigation into social issues27. Indeed, as historian Denis Thouard notes at the opening of a conference devoted to a reflexive return to the index paradigm: “[...] the human sciences, the knowledge of culture, concern an object that is not or no longer is, that must in any case be artificially reconstructed, without any assurance that this reconstruction would be fit for purpose... It is oriented based on what remains. Since its object is preliminary and singular, it begins with induction from indices that become, within a hypothetical reasoning, meaningful signs” (Thouard 2007, p. 10). Here, we recognize all the structuring features of a trace schema, torn from their evidentiary basis to be subjected to critical discussion. Ginzburg has indeed gone in search of traces of something to which the texts can testify28 and something particularly complex – acts, practices, representations, a culture that once were. He makes this clear in the same conference, where he recalls that in the main works done before the writing of the article “Spie”29, he sought to “decipher” the beliefs 26 This article, originally published in 1979 in Italian in a collective volume on epistemological conflicts (Ginzburg 1979), was translated the following year into French in the journal Le Débat, with a modified title, “Signes, traces, pistes: racines d’un paradigme indiciaire” (“Signs, Traces, Paths: Roots of an Index Paradigm”) (Ginzburg 1980a) then assembled in collective volumes in Italian (Ginzburg 1986) and French, in a new translation (Ginzburg 1989) – the edition that I use here. For elements on the history of this publication, see Thouard (2007). 27 Ginzburg refers to Warburg in his texts and in some respects his approach is an heir to Mnemosyne, particularly in his investigation of Piero della Francesca (Ginzburg 1983), but it is that which distinguishes his aim of personal knowledge, properly indexical, from that of Warburg – the search for traces of something – that will hold our attention. 28 In his lecture, Ginzburg refers to the Greek term τεκμηριον (testimony) and questions its meaning in terms of evidence and/or proof. 29 In particular, two monographs on witchcraft in Friuli (Ginzburg 1980b; Ginzburg 1980c).

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and attitudes of peasants accused of witchcraft in the 16th and 18th Centuries (Ginzburg in Thouard 2009, p. 39). However, this research is carried out in the texts, busy “reading between the lines” to use his expression. Here again, as a non-historian, and without any claim to explaining Ginzburg’s journey, I rely on some of the texts he wrote, among others, to identify the way in which Ginzburg raises the question. I will start with the way in which Ginzburg personally returned, in the context of this same symposium, to the index paradigm formula and especially to the commonplace life of the latter, under the title “Reflections on a hypothesis, twenty-five years later” (Ginzburg in Thouard 2007, pp. 37–47). Indeed, the author has not ceased to reflexively and critically question himself on the spectacular success of certain publications, such as the title of the study on the miller Menocchio, The Cheese and The Worms (Ginzburg 1980c), the formula “index paradigm” or the label of “micro-history” (micro-storia), which was soon bestowed upon his research. These phenomena, which he tries to explain, especially in the successive prefaces of The Cheese and The Worms, are very paradoxical for him, because he is very far, as the content of his books shows, from wanting to be a school, a manifesto or a system – even if, as we will see, his rhetoric does not exclude having this interpretation. I will briefly repeat the argument of this conference, because its review of the commonplace life30 of the article makes it possible, in my opinion, to avoid some of the misinterpretations to which it may have been subjected. Ginzburg immediately expressed his regret that he “could not speak of these pages as if they were being read for the first time”, which was impossible. After proposing a “layered” reading of the text, to which we will return later, he wondered about the success, very unexpected in his eyes, of the article, which had been “received with intense and, on several occasions, intensely polemical interest”. A reception of the text and title that in a way confuses the author. “I realized”, continues Ginzburg, “that I had grasped something that was in tune with the times and that I had given voice to diffuse themes that had sometimes rested in a latent state”, adding: “I was especially afraid of being trapped in this happy formula: ‘index paradigm’. Now, I am wary of formulas such as slogans because they can lead to shortcuts. Obviously, the process of personal knowledge must start again each time by rethinking its own assumptions. That is why I deliberately avoided using the term ‘index paradigm’ for twenty-five years. And yet this hypothesis has guided my work in depth [...]” (Ginzburg in Thouard 2007, p. 38). 30 This formula is obviously mine because, to my knowledge, Ginzburg has never referred to this theoretical framework, but the content of the analysis mobilizes most of the questions I have placed under this concept.

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The first important information to note is that Ginzburg carefully avoided the formula that researchers and consultants keep repeating. What Ginzburg is expressing here is not disavowal, a denial of the expression index paradigm (which he had placed prominently in the article “Spie”); rather, it is a matter of finding, beyond its multiple rewritings, the theoretical question that the article aimed at and that the researcher did not fully recognize until later. The historian thus distances himself from the multiple more or less unfaithful claims to the formula, as well as and especially from the inadequacies of his own methodological argumentation of indexical reasoning in “Spie”. We are interested in these self-criticisms, which are not masochistic but creative. Ginzburg, as a reviewer of “Spie”, notes that “there was no room for a discussion of conjectures that could have subsequently been misleading”, because “the possibilities and success of the index paradigm [seemed] more important than the procedures that made it possible to attribute to this paradigm a scientificity in itself, understood as a scientificity that would not be modeled on the hard sciences” (Ginzburg in Thouard 2007, p. 39). Ginzburg recounts how he had to critically revisit, in the 1980s, the relative indifference to the question of proof and validation of evidence that “Spie” had shown, based on a cruel personal episode, the inability to defend his friend the far-left journalist Adriano Sofri against an unfair accusation of murder (Ginzburg 1997). We have not had time to dwell on this episode – politically and existentially decisive – but the subject here summarized draws our attention, and highlights the importance of the construction of “conjectures” (in the line of Peirce’s reflections on the uncertainty of the index – see section 2.1) and the construction of aggregates for interpretation and authentication of traces (Leleu-Merviel 2017) in the particular case of textual and document analysis. Let us first of all avoid any misinterpretation. If Ginzburg had privileged in 1979 “the possibilities and success of the index paradigm”, it was not out of concern for recognition, but to give the quite pamphlet-like article all its provocative force with regard to dominant beliefs in history. “Spie” is an article of combat in the anthroposocial sciences. This is made explicit by Ginzburg a little further on, noting that the success of the idea of a scientific paradigm is a double-edged sword. It can reinforce a kind of thought of system and simplification – the same one that triumphs in current declarations on the transition from a document paradigm to a trace paradigm – whereas “Spie” emphasized attention to detail and the search for singularity. A misunderstanding that he sought to resolve in 2007 by returning from the noun “paradigm” to the adjective “paradigmatic”, which he had himself used before the publication of Kuhn’s book, citing a 1960 article on a case of witchcraft in which he stated that the particular case “can assume a so-to-speak paradigmatic meaning” (Ginzburg in Thouard 2007, p. 45). It does not matter if this justification a posteriori is of a rhetorical nature. It recalls that the central aim of “Spie” is to fight against the widespread belief in the social sciences, translated into a methodological

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prohibition, that only “normal”, “average” and “representative” cases can give access to the social world and be the subject of generalization31. Ginzburg translates this into the very simple idea that historians are first and foremost interested in what seems normal to them and that working on traces may change that. For Ginzburg, the trace is the detail that kills academic prejudice. Re-reading the conclusion of “Spie”, Ginsburg summarizes: “It was necessary to start from apparently marginal details to grasp the overall meaning of a reality obscured by the mists of ideology” (Ginzburg in Thouard 2007, p. 42). Indexical investigation into the trace thus leads, like the poetics of Mnemosyne but with completely different aims, to the question of documentary work. “Too often, historians confuse the documentation they know with the documentation available, the documentation available with the documentation that has been produced, and the latter with the social reality that produced it” (Ginzburg in Thouard 2007, p. 42). To really read Ginzburg does not transport us from a world of document to a world of trace; rather, it allows us to explore a world where, to parody Einstein, few traces lead us away from the document, but a lot of traces lead back to it. As the historian writes in connection with his investigation of Piero della Francesca’s work, justifying the construction of a dual formal and contextual study of the works, “the solution is not to eliminate, more or less tacitly, the requirement of documentary control, but rather to develop adequate instruments of control” (Ginzburg 1983, p. 16). In short, a documentary poetics that we will see later in The Cheese and the Worms. I think that this detour through the historian’s effort to adjust to the commonplace life of his theory and to interpret and qualify the issues at stake (Jutant 2011) equips our eyes to carefully read “Spie”. The essential is said by the historian himself examining the issue of the formula. In the limited space of this book, we can measure this reflection – and thus distance ourselves from the commonplace conception of the index paradigm – by returning to the literal text of the article “Spie” as a theoretical manifesto (Ginzburg 1989) and then to the most famous of the empirical studies in which the historian carries out a search for traces of a culture, The Cheese and The Worms (Ginzburg 1980c). In reading “Spie”, the first paradox that strikes us, one observed as we have seen by the author/reader of his text, is that the term paradigm, which has triumphed in sociology of science as an integrated theory of culture aligning tools, methods, theories and institutions, is used in an article that multiplies challenges and proposals of a different nature and only highlights the gaps between these strata of knowledge. Under this subtitle, we read an article of unusual creativity and intellectual ambition, but with a layered structure. It should be remembered, 31 In a text on the tragic question of the persecution of Jews entitled “Unus testis: the persecution of Jews and the principle of reality” (2010, pp. 305–334), Ginzburg severely criticizes what he calls the transfer to historical science of the legal principle unus testis, testis nullus (one witness is no witness).

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however, that Ginzburg’s formula is not totally fixed, since he wrote in 1979, evoking the framework of the multiple components of indexical reasoning: “Underlying all this is the paradigm that throughout the discourse we have called, depending on the context, cynegetic, divinatory, index or semiotic” and which he calls for to be “disarticulated” (Ginzburg 1989, pp. 169–170). In his 2007 review, Ginzburg refers to what he calls historical, theoretical and autobiographical “layers” respectively. Leaving aside, here, the last one, whose meaning belongs to the author, we can deploy these layers more broadly, which I will formulate, here, in terms of the issues at stake. However, it seems to me that, from the point of view of communication analysis, these different issues do not necessarily converge. In my reading of it, “Spie” develops no less than six essential theses. Ginzburg first identifies, in an approach that does not avoid evoking Foucault (1966), an intellectual moment, a kind of episteme, a kind of historical positivity, which he situates at the end of the 19th Century, and whose coherence is expressed in a series of works and authors, a little like the episteme of representation in Foucault: Port-Royal and grammar, Buffon and natural history, Turgot and economics for one; Morelli and pictorial expertise, Freud and psychoanalysis, Doyle and the crime novel, among others32 for the other. It is the search for discrete signs, the attention to detail and margins and the audacity of interpretation that make it possible to subsume these different enterprises under the same paradigm: “In all three cases even infinitesimal traces make it possible to grasp a deeper reality, which is impossible to reach otherwise. Traces: more precisely, symptoms (in the case of Freud), clues (in the case of Sherlock Holmes), pictorial signs (in the case of Morelli)” (Ginzburg 1989, p. 147). In passing, Ginzburg structures a vocabulary in which several terms make a system, traces (spie/tracce), symptoms (sintomi), indices or clues (indizi), imprints (orme), signs (segni) – spie, tracce and indize being competitors for the role of hyperonym – and he finds in medical semiology the most accomplished and legitimate model of this type of inference. However, the paradigm is not as historical as the episteme in Foucault. By sending out probes over time, Ginzburg defends the idea that this “index paradigm” explicitly affirmed in the 19th Century corresponds to a kind of fundamental anthropological stance – one could say an instinct – that he illustrates through a series of figures, from prehistoric hunters to inductive narratives of the 18th Century. Man, born a hunter, “has learned to feel, record, interpret and classify infinitesimal traces” (Ginzburg 1989, p. 148). One might think, in the manner of Hegel (2012 [1830]), that what is revealed and affirmed in the industrial era was a 32 For example, fingerprints, photography, medical diagnosis and graphology.

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form of reason in development throughout human history. The 19th Century would not have invented the index paradigm but would have only recognized and legitimized it. This tracking of the trackers mobilizes a large number of figures, in a journey resembling a musical “theme and variations”, and basically consisting of a web of episodes. Rereading himself a quarter of a century later, Ginzburg observes: “A narrative fragmented by sudden discontinuities, separate phenomena in an arc of several millennia: the divination of the Babylonians, the practice of connoisseurs and the beginnings of palaeography in 18th century Rome, the use of fingerprints as an instrument of identification used by the English administration in India at the end of the 19th century, and so on” (Thouard 2007, p. 39). These different fragments of history inevitably reveal a certain fragility, as shown by Christin’s severe criticism of the genesis of reading from hunting, already mentioned in section 3.3.1. It is not, however, the criticism of these errors that may be of particular interest to us. As Ginzburg himself suggests, this story aims above all to give substance to a form of approach to reality and interpretation of signs: in the terms used, here, for a certain type of semiosis. The index paradigm is, in reality, an explicit formulation of the trace schema with the status of a strategy of personal knowledge. Here, the article takes a new turn. While presenting itself as an anachronistic story, the article advances as a way to find, from multiple examples, a precise definition of indexical reasoning: “What characterizes this knowledge is the ability to trace, from apparently negligible experimental facts, back to a complex reality, which is not directly experimentable. It may be added that these facts are always arranged by the observer in such a way as to give rise to a narrative sequence, the simplest formulation of which could be ‘someone has been there’” (Ginzburg 1989, pp. 148–149). Once again, we recognize the schema of the trace, with two important nuances. On the one hand, indexicality is endowed with a flexible set of temporal aspects with regard to the it has been (investigation), the it is (diagnosis) and the it will be (divination). On the other hand, the index paradigm is based on a deliberate policy of presentification, of visibility, of polemical nature: it is a question of focusing the gaze on the objects considered the most insignificant or deviant, by diverting it from what is usually recognized. For Ginzburg, the trace is what seems not to exist – or to barely exist – because our habits neglect it. It involves the sub-ordinary (Souchier 2012). The opposite of obviousness.

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This thesis once again rebounds in a twofold way, because it undergoes a double mutation throughout the article, towards a sort of zoological anthropology and towards a normative epistemology. On the one hand, it seems to provide an argument for the project of naturalization of the social sciences supported at the same time by some analytical philosophers, insofar as this large fragmentary fresco suggests that the most elaborate of human interpretative thinking, and in particular the reading of texts, has its source in the atavistic heritage of the animal in survival. The ferment of narrativity becomes a grand narrative, which has the disadvantage of not excluding reductive interpretations of the paradigm: “For thousands of years,” says Ginzburg, who has become a mythologist, “man has been a hunter. During countless pursuits he learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of an invisible prey [...] to perform complex mental operations with lightning speed, in the thickness of a thicket or in a glade full of ambushes” (Ginzburg 1989, p. 148). In this retrospective utopia, we believe we can read Rousseau’s writing: “Let us start by dismissing the facts, because they do not touch the question” (Rousseau 1964, p. 132). More interesting is the use of the hypothesis as a manifesto of historical research, which is the theoretical pole of the article, whose empirical pole was the analysis of experts, psychiatrists, detectives, photographers, police officers and graphologists of the 19th Century. In the course of the article, the historian has indeed gradually slipped from an initial intellectual project – identifying a certain historically constructed epistemology – to a second, very different one – defending the relevance of this epistemology in contemporary historical research. This is where careful attention must be paid to the letter of the texts – even if it means that the historiographer’s reflexive thought brings more than nuances to the archaeologist’s hypotheses of animal thought in man. A careful reading of the article and the texts that contemporary researchers devote to its epistemological exegesis draws a portrait of indexical inquiry that is very different from what superficial readers – or those who have only read the title – draw from it. I do not have the space, here, to detail these very dense pages. I will draw four major features from it, which have the value of stimulating the rest of our research: indexical inquiry is highly interpretative, fragile, non-mathematizable and incompatible with positivist epistemology. All proposals to which it will be necessary to return and which corroborate the idea, defended by several, quite isolated, researchers (Ertzscheid et al. in Barats 2013, pp. 53–68; Schmitt 2015; Colomb 2016), that defining computer processing by this paradigm is adventurous:

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“It is clear that the group of disciplines we have called indexical (including medicine) does not at all meet the criteria of scientificity that can be deduced from Galileo’s paradigm. These are indeed highly qualitative disciplines, whose objects are individual cases, situations and documents, as individuals, and it is precisely for this reason that they achieve results which maintain an irreducible margin of error” (Ginzburg 1989, p. 153). In this type of research, it is indeed “impossible to eliminate the elastic rigor (forgive me for the oxymoron) of the index paradigm” (Ginzburg 1989, p. 179), just as the “low intuition” (Ginzburg 1989, p. 180) required by real attention to singularity and to the fact that research is constructed like a tapestry (Ginzburg 1989, p. 169) and not like a program. The index paradigm does not assert a primacy of causality, but a particular art of combining attention to the singular with conscious interpretation. This has several methodological consequences on which we can focus. First, the historian confirms that indexical reasoning is the richest, most creative, as well as the most fragile. The trace may be notable to the attentive observer, but it in no way refers to its cause or context. As Thouard explains, summarizing Ginzburg’s argument: “Indices are relatively undetermined signs, signs that must first be identified as such. Can conjectural reasoning lead to knowledge, and to what extent? This is more than just the production of hypotheses, based on universal personal knowledge, and leading to possible deductions” (Thouard 2007, p. 12). He adds that, contrary to the Enlightenment’s dream of creating universal encyclopedic knowledge, “in the situation of the human sciences, such an encyclopedia is never possessed, most knowledge being subject to controversy, or even, one might add, being defined by its controversial character”. Explaining the speculative nature of indexical analysis is undoubtedly one of Ginzburg’s major achievements. This does not mean that no reliable interpretation of indices is possible – Ginzburg criticizes absolute relativism – but that it requires a very complex construction of series of objects and texts and the use of “historically formulated and historically negotiable procedures that make it possible to distinguish a true conjecture from a false conjecture” (Ginzburg in Thouard 2007, p. 39). However, these procedures include two mediations that finally radically distinguish the conduct of the animal watching its prey from the historian engaged in an

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investigation (and, therefore, excludes the naturalistic reading of the social world)33. The importance of the constitution of the series of objects of analysis, to which we will not return because of the study of Mnemosyne, known to Ginzburg, showed its importance with the careful reflection on the status given to the text, as an object requiring particular mediation to be constituted as a trace of human activity. Hence, this often overlooked conclusion, the sixth and final critical re-reading of Ginzburg by himself, the deconstruction: “We have so far talked about an index paradigm (and its synonyms) in the broad sense. The time has come to disarticulate it. Analysing footprints, stars, faeces (animal or human), mucus, nails, pulsations, snow fields or cigarette ashes is one thing; analyzing writing, paintings or speeches is another. The distinction between nature (inanimate or living) and culture is fundamental – certainly more so than the infinitely superficial and changing distinction between each discipline” (Ginzburg 1989, p. 170). Devoting a moment to a narrow analysis of the Ginzburg method in action can give a concrete form to these requirements and thus strengthen our means of taking a critical look at contemporary indexical reading systems of the social world. In the introduction to his book The Cheese and the Worms, Ginzburg recounts how he came up with the idea of working on deviant individuals who have been the subject of witchcraft trials and, based on simple footnotes, devoting two books to them. After a first book on a series of inquisition trials, he became interested in the culture of a miller, Menocchio, who was discovered during his trials to be an ardent reader and even, in some respects, a thinker. This investigation is made possible by the fact that the judicial and religious institution, by organizing trials, unwittingly constituted a set of written records, according to a logic that Discipline and Punish has made us able to understand (see section 3.4.2). Consequently, work on indices is work on texts, but on particular texts, whose context and issues over-determine their nature. “The voices of the persecuted”, writes Ginzburg in the foreword to his book’s reissued in 2011, “reach us (when they reach us) through the filter of the questions asked by the inquisitors, transcribed by their notaries”. The purpose of the research is not identical to that of the historians of reading mentioned in section 1.2. It is not only a question of accessing a practice of the book but, through the traces studied in the books, a cultural practice testifying (testis text) to an oral and popular culture. The exceptional case of a literate miller, a lover of books and endowed with a certain rhetorical virtuosity, is at the service of a program that is both intellectual and political, which consists of removing dominated cultures from their status of

33 The paradox can be explained in this manner; Ginzburg thinks that reading arises from hunting, but is not reduced to it.

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servile reproduction of dominant models in order to explore their own poetics: an issue intensely discussed at the time (Passeron and Grignon 1989). However, in a writing society, the indices of oral culture must be sought in the written word. This does not surprise an author who knows that historical knowledge is always mediated. Committed, in accordance with the principles of indexical inquiry, to seeking out what structures the culture of this individual whom he has chosen because he is singular and deviant, Ginzburg uses the “records of the two trials held against him fifteen years apart [which] give us a rich picture of his thoughts and feelings, of his dreams and aspirations [to] reconstruct a fragment of what we have taken to calling the ‘culture of the subaltern classes’, or even ‘popular culture’”. However, Ginzburg makes the mischievous observation that “unfortunately, historians cannot start talking to 16th century peasants” (Ginzburg 1980c, pp. 8–9). Hence, they have difficulty escaping the alternative between slavishly following what the official institution says about the people, or renouncing the possibility of getting to know them and “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. However, according to him, this aporia can be overcome by taking a risk: that of conducting a careful study of the status of the trial texts, their polyphony, the readings they testify to, by supplementing these observations with series of other texts drawn from the production of books circulating in the social world of the miller. If the literature on popular culture is almost always overdetermined, its mediations can be studied. Let us make an important point here. Unlike most current techniques for tracking traces of use, it is an intense philological and hermeneutical activity that underlies the index paradigm in action. I will limit myself here to a few examples of this enormous work of identifying, collecting, reading and interpreting texts. Ginzburg tracks down in all the texts of the trials, as well as in the few letters of the miller, all the references made by him or his interlocutors to books. However, he knows that some of Menocchio’s readings are not mentioned, and to identify them, he must identify texts that circulate in the environment in which he lives and seek in the very form of his words – in the poetics of Mnemosyne – the repetition of certain ideas and especially of certain stories and metaphors. In some cases, the historian must consider the hypothesis that the title mentioned by the miller in his trial refers to confusion and sometimes he identifies another work, whose title is similar, that is referred to by a parallel exchange or that appears in another trial. Above all, the historian attaches decisive importance to what could only be described as misunderstandings or errors in the reading of titles which investigation has shown that Menocchio really read. By doing the considerable documentary work of identifying in the production of books the passages to which the miller refers in his words and letters, Ginzburg highlights a frequent, almost systematic gap between the literal meaning of these texts and the interpretation he gives to them. This could

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be considered, in a direct conception of the trace, as certain signs of misunderstanding. However, the historian decides to study the poetic dimension of these readings. He assumes that no historical evidence is direct and, therefore, integrates four decisive mediations in his reading of the corpora he himself has compiled. The miller’s words are interpreted as ways of assuming his own culture – very singular, even fantastic, in the eyes of a rationalist idea of nature and religion34 – in situations of communication where he is summoned to interpret it in an intellectual framework that is not his own. Under these conditions, the relationship to the written text is interpreted in relation to cultural resources that are more decisive for him than the book, in a reading practice that Ginzburg chooses to consider as the meeting of heterogeneous social norms and interpretants. In addition, through the identification of features of a worldview that Menocchio shares with a community that often does not read – which gives it a special status – Ginzburg’s interpretative, quotations and narrative activity makes it possible to put forward hypotheses on a “relationship with the text that is completely different from that of today’s cultivated readers” (Ginzburg 1980c, p. 18). Finally, the historian decides to take the miller’s words seriously, because the attendance of the trial reports and his letters and the way he consciously goes to torture during his last trial convinced him that he is not trying to “save his skin” by cunning, but that he is performing, a little like a modern intellectual, a public thought and speech. He, therefore, seeks to understand how the miller, in the midst of intellectual, imaginary and religious contradictions, could have come to develop a kind of personal cosmology and ontology, and a conception of faith totally opposed to the sacraments: all extremely strange doctrines, but which, observed closely, show a strong proximity with the political and philosophical conceptions of advanced intellectuals. This requires him to engage in the construction of a new documentary corpus. Finally, I would like to analyze more closely one example among others of this editorial, literary and ethnographic work on texts. The book presents a lengthy investigation into a compilation of 14th-Century travel accounts attributed to a fictional John de Mandeville. The historian makes this choice because the miller himself takes the initiative to refer to it, when he is asked about the personal relationships that might have influenced him and responds, as he always does, that his thought is personal and that it comes from his reading. Ginzburg quotes the miller’s words: “Sir, I do not know that I have ever taught anyone, nor have I ever had accomplices in my opinions; what I said, I said because of that book of Mandeville that I read”, then, in a letter sent to his judges, he mentions the fact of 34 Menocchio imagined a whole cosmogony in which beings, including God, are born from the fermentation of a primordial matter similar to a cheese, and he expounds it as it is with confidence in court.

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“having read this book of Mandeville, of so many kinds of generations and various laws, that it had wholly tormented me with them” (Ginzburg 1980c, pp. 79–80). Taking these statements seriously, Ginzburg will seek to understand not only what Menocchio has read and how he has understood it but also what the disorder he evokes is. “Why this ‘torment’, he asks, why this concern? To answer, we must first see what the book actually contained” (Ginzburg 1980c, p. 80). Here again, we must make an important observation. Even if the reading of texts is oriented towards an indexical interpretation, it involves taking the text seriously and even making the historian an authentic reader of the miller, occupying the fictitious place of a person of good faith. For the historian, it is necessary first to read the texts in a symbolic relationship and then to claim to draw an indexical interpretation from them. This is because the practice it seeks to understand is cultural in nature and respected as such. This remark will be decisive in the analysis of contemporary traceability devices that do not respect the texts they submit for calculation. The historian must, therefore, read Menocchio’s words intelligently, to then take a look at the book he is quoting and discern, in this book in the form of varieties, the feature that made it a popular success – a kind of tourist guide to the Holy Land – and what caught the miller’s attention, the description of rites and beliefs of different faiths and above all the detailed description of the Muslim religion, which seems to have raised doubts in him. He goes in search of the means available to the miller to find out about it. “Mandeville’s long presentation of Muhammad’s religion had an even greater appeal for Menocchio. We know from the second trial that he sought (but, as we have said, the testimony is not certain) to satisfy his curiosity about this by reading directly from the Koran, which had been translated into Italian in the middle of the 16th century. Already, through Mandeville’s travels, Menocchio had been able to learn some of the theories supported by the Mohammedans, which were in part consistent with his statements” (Ginzburg 1980c, p. 81), especially with his doubts about the divinity of Jesus or the crucifixion. However, Ginzburg believes that this simple information about the diversity of beliefs may have disturbed Menocchio but not tormented him. Deepening his reading of Mandeville’s collection and comparing several passages of the book with other moments of the interrogations, he imagines another interpretation, which he will retain without stating it peremptorily. The collection contains a rather picturesque passage that describes a scene of ritual cannibalism, uncensored at a time when the control of minds was poorly assured, a passage that struck the miller as shown by the interrogations. However, Menocchio does not read this text as a curiosity. He understands “badly” a passage that refers to “good” and “bad” flesh, terms he understands in a moral sense. This offbeat reading, as attested by the words of the miller on trial, introduces into this man, in sincere search of an answer to his metaphysical questions a profound doubt about the immortality of the soul:

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“[...] Menocchio’s ardent memory had melted, transposed, transformed words and sentences. The one killed with too thin a flesh had undoubtedly become bad (to eat), and the one with a fat flesh had been good (to eat). The gastronomic-moral ambiguity of these terms (good, bad) had attracted the allusion to sins, by moving it from killers to the killed [...] Menocchio deformed the text with aggressiveness (but of course in an involuntary way). The flood of questions he asked the books went far beyond the written page. However, in this case the function of the text was far from secondary: ‘And it is from this that I drew my opinion that at the death of the body, the soul also dies, since among so many different nations, some believe this and others that’” (Ginzburg 1980c, p. 86). The exploration of the power of books and reading is not yet complete – there is no final interpreter in Ginzburg – even if we do not have the time to study in detail the steps involved, nor the other strategies for collecting and reading texts, which are always unique and based on the same principles. The final hypothesis will be that “through Mandeville’s Voyages, this innocent account woven from fabulous elements, translated and reprinted countless times, an echo of medieval religious tolerance reached the time of the Wars of Religion, the excommunications and the burning of heretics. It was probably only one of the many channels that fed a popular current – now very little known – that favored tolerance” (Ginzburg 1980c, p. 88). All this work, which is all too quickly mentioned, here, is marked both by a scrupulous concern to make any hypothesis objective and by an acute awareness of the importance of interpretative decisions and the fact that they are actualized in a set of accepted and discussed gestures: identification of texts, definition of their status, linking, reading, rewriting. Ginzburg wants to defend the creativity of popular culture and its own identity in relation to the learned culture of its time. He intends to show that in some respects a miller who does not integrate any of the rules of scholarly reading, but takes books seriously and sincerely seeks to reflect on them with his oral culture, can develop a thinking closer to the most advanced elements of the intellectual world than the clerics with whom he is confronted. He chooses to read all the texts as texts, taking into account their editorial, documentary, ideological, semiotic, hermeneutical mediations, rather than simply making them reservoirs of direct indices. It is clear that an indexical approach that would respond to other assumptions would lead to a very different interpretation of the life of the miller Menocchio. 4.2.3. Quotations, from second hand to guestimates In the last pages of his article “Spie”, Ginzburg states a provocative formula, little noted by commentators, that reminds us that he wanted above all to ask

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embarrassing questions for the scientific institution. In response to colleagues who exclude any approach to popular culture that is not based on the quantitative treatment of extended corpora, he immediately states: “The quantitative and anti-anthropocentric orientation of the natural sciences starting from Galileo has placed the human sciences in an unpleasant dilemma: either assuming a weak scientific status to achieve significant results, or assuming a strong scientific status to achieve negligible results” (Ginzburg 1989, pp. 178–179). In short, for Ginzburg, the methodological mountain of Big Data gives birth to a heuristic mouse. This is the conclusion of reflection on the index paradigm, which is a thousand miles from what is generally sought for, but which we must take seriously. It is not certain that anthroposocial sciences will have to choose between quantified banality and risky relevance: it would be too simple. Such an alternative between meaning and science is clearly controversial. The real question, thorny if ever there were one, is to ask to what extent and above all under what conditions can we claim to objectify human beings and how the project of qualifying them can counter that of quantifying them (Leleu-Merviel 2008)35. However, it is certain that subjecting texts to large-scale quantitative processing to track down indices about our society is a gesture that takes us far from the conception of the index paradigm defended by Ginzburg. Rather than pretending to decide the outcome of this debate, I would like to understand what is at stake. To this end, I will focus on a particular textual form, the quotation, which has been the subject of extensive indexical interpretation procedures and has, therefore, undergone significant shifts in the definition of its status as a record of practice. I mean by quotation here the broad sense of discourse analysis and language engineering, as the inscription by an author of texts of others within their own texts or making reference to these external texts, according to the etymological meaning of the Latin verb citare (to set in motion). This, whatever its concrete form, has varied greatly throughout history (Rosier 1998; Jeanneret 2014, pp. 109–119; Paveau 2017). I would like to summarize a few episodes of this story in broad terms, the purpose of the narrative being to be able to precisely identify some of the major changes in the way the text becomes a trace of media metamorphosis. To study in detail the relationships between indexical reasoning, calculation, statistical science and computer science would require at least an entire 35 In this book, I have used computations of terms. I have tried not to draw excessive conclusions about what they may reveal. Most so-called “qualitative” analyses of texts are based on observations of frequency or recurrences, sometimes very simple, but real. The important question is that of the use of numbers and their interpretation.

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book. The purpose of these lines is to identify some questions that may help identify emerging issues in indexical text interpretation, hence our asking the question of what is being preserved and transformed from the index paradigm in these processes. Quoting is a very frequent structuring act in the culture of the text. It is at the same time a form of expression, a gesture and an institutional fact. Far from being a simple detail of expression, it is a major structure of writing (Compagnon 1979). It connects different cultural horizons, ensures the transmission of texts in space and time, introduces a dialogue between authors, circulates texts in society, ensures the management of the discourse of others, regulates the relationship between personal thought and reference, mediates cultural values, etc. (Bakhtin 1977, pp. 161–220). Hence, analysis of the forms and issues of quoting plays a major role in literary studies, in the analysis of social discourses and in the study of communication mediations. These properties also explain why, beyond the interest in this textual form as such, quoting presents an ideal case for those who seek in a text the traces of a cultural practice. It is located at the junction of the gestures of reading and writing and materializes this interaction in the form of an inscription that fixes it and makes it accessible for subsequent analysis. The text bears the trace of a graphic gesture, produced on a medium (section 3.2), the nature and reasons for which can be accepted. This material gesture of quoting puts a text and a writing practice in relation to other texts and other writing practices. It is, therefore, a relationship not only between two discourses but also between two intentions, two situations, two places and two temporalities (sometimes very close, sometimes centuries apart). In addition, quoting (explicit or allusive) circulates not only as texts between people but also as people between texts. As such, it presupposes a reading, a judgment and a desire: it inscribes a trace of use within the text itself and makes it materially graspable (Davallon et al. in Souchier et al. 2003, pp. 47–90). The quotation designates, selects, marks. We can, to stretch the point, say that it is building a library, and, therefore, a form of cultural life. Tell me who you quote, and I shall tell you who you are and in which space of thought you live. In the stage adaptation of La Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire presented by Stéphane Verrue and François Clavier at the Théâtre des Halles d’Avignon as part of the Festival Off in 2017, all the books cited in the work were placed on the stage and the actor grabbed each book to give substance to the quotations and thus to the humanist’s space of thought. For the tracker of traces, quoting is, therefore, a godsend. Hence, Menocchio’s quoting is very important to Ginzburg. The historian identifies them in the trial reports and letters, refers to the documents cited, reads them and brings them together from different sources on the practices and beliefs of the community. For

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him, the act of quoting is an active mediation with desires, commitments, knowledge and arguments. However, the historian does not take this action at face value. It is necessary to compare the discourse with the quoted texts in order to make hypotheses about the reasons why the miller quotes them. This can help establish the status and social circulation of these texts and make hypotheses about other corpora (oral and written, explicit and implicit, respected or betrayed). All this can occur because the expression of a problem that is difficult to explain has played the role of punctum in the reading of the archives. Enlightened by this question about what moves a human being, to quote takes on a singular meaning. For the historian, there is quoting and quoting, value and value of the same quotation, mediation and mediation between reading, copying, reproducing and invoking. A quotation does not have the same meaning for the miller as it does for his judges. In other words, for the historian, quoting is polysemic (it has many meanings) and polychristic (it serves many purposes). What the historian identifies in this case is a general phenomenon, which has not lost any of its importance today. Each occurrence of the act of quoting has its meaning and value. For example, I can make a quotation to make something look pretty, because the idea inspires me, to stimulate a reading, as well as to make fun of it, to prove an error, to rebel. It is an act of communication as we never just quote, we quote in a certain situation, with certain intentions, for other readers, often with comments. The mediation of a resource moves from a use made towards uses anticipated (Davallon et al. 2003), mediation addressed to a public of potential readers. The designers of statistical quotation processing, which developed particularly in the second half of the 20th Century, were interested in both for the same reasons as the historian and for wholly different reasons. Like the historian, quoting is, in their eyes, attached to a set of practices and spaces of communication that it contains as a seed. However, what interests them above all is that it is identified, manipulated, counted, inventoried and followed in the form of a text within a text. The large-scale processing of quotations makes it possible to base an indexical inquiry on a mass of data and to control its method and results in order to claim representativeness and measurable objectification of the indices collected. This is something that the historian’s work on a case and at the level of a few texts cannot guarantee. However, to do this, several types of simplifications must be made, which concern both the nature of the quotation process and the nature of the indexical reasoning. First, the quote must be identified and sampled. The reader does this quite easily, except when the allusion is obscure; however, its approach is not systematic and it does not guarantee any exhaustiveness. The machine, on the other hand, can only locate quotations if there is a rule that defines their form – in itself or when related to a context by more or less complex operations. Given this, identification is

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systematic and exhaustive, within the selected criteria. The simplest criteria are obviously those which the machine can automatically identify in the strings of characters or more generally in the material symbols it manipulates. We think of punctuation marks, but they vary a lot and there are many quotations in different forms. In reality, the rigorous identification of quotations from other parts of the text by automatic methods is extremely difficult in linguistic engineering (Mourad and Minel 2000). Hence, even if language sciences develop very complex procedures for locating quotations in texts, most industrial computer systems that nowadays process large volumes of texts use mainly either the locating of strings (essentially the presence of the author’s name) or technical operations that are easy to identify by computerized data recording of operations: the number, frequency, duration of connections to a site, the topography of hypertext links, the sending of attachments, the transmission of tweets, etc. This is because the efficiency of processing is more important in web industries than the relevance of the information. It is, then, necessary to be able to collect the quotations, thus to abstract from the link that each one maintains with a particular situation, a place, a particular text, and to make a homogeneous collection of them. Only what belongs to the same category can be compared and measured, become commensurable (Desrosières 2000). In this operation, the materiality of the medium, the status of the medium and the context of the quotations inevitably disappear. The quotations must be removed from much of its material, social and symbolic thickness in order to handle it and submit it to scrutiny. However, given this, we can compare, count and classify quotations and, through them, practices, therefore producing representations of practices, values and objects that have a claim to reflect not only aggregates of individuals but also social forms. These operations did not originate with computer science: content and discourse analysis, in its most traditional forms, for example at the ENS Saint-Cloud in the 1960s, already needed to transform heterogeneous texts into word packets. However, the use of the statistical tool, then its computerization, has given incomparable power to these operations, in their constructive and destructive aspects. These are the transmutations that quotations must undergo in order to be processed. However, the development of information technology tools also requires that the processing itself be programmed. This involves two main requirements, linked to the very idea of a computer program. On the one hand, a computer program implements an explicit inference scenario: one of these little narratives I mentioned above must be coded for the machine (and not just imagined in the mind of a reader). For example: quoting proves that one is interested in a text; quoting reveals a path of thought; quoting pays tribute to a work and an author; quoting expresses the balance of power in the publishing or academic institution; and quoting indicates belonging to a social universe. Here, the

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processing receives a semantics. It is associated with an interpretation aggregate. Of course, these scenarios are more or less sophisticated, and they can, at the cost of great complexity, access fine data. Here again, however, what prevails in industrial processes is what gives the most useful statistical information for mainly economic or managerial purposes. For example, we know that some quotations can be polemical, but we consider that the vast majority of them express interest and can be trusted, so we will not take into account the rejected quotations. On the other hand, when this calculation is carried out by computer science, it can only take the form of what the machine can achieve, obeying computational logic (Bachimont 2004). However, the latter only knows what has been coded in conventional language; it only mobilizes forms, regardless of their meaning; and it assembles and disassembles them, classifies them, segments them and submits them to a combinatory logic. These processing operations never concern meaning. Finally, the calculation is not visible. Numbers count, figures are written. The computation must, therefore, be translated into forms, which are the mediations of presentification of the indexical reports that have been identified. It must display figures (Bouchard 2008), curves (Chevalier and Jeanneret 2009), maps (Jeanneret in Galinon and Zlitni 2013, pp. 235–267), Analytics (Grignon 2012), dashboards (German 2017), lists of awards (Bouchard et al. 2015), etc. More generally, it mobilizes “representational engineering” (Bigot 2018, p. 216) and “epiphanic devices” (Chasseray and Jeanneret in Galinon-Mélénec 2015). Throughout this process, the quotation is manipulated and integrated into sets of rules and, therefore, delivers more and more information of an indexical nature, increasingly integrated into scenarios and increasingly visualized. However, in doing this, it is increasingly detached from the text to which it belongs and becomes an indication of something else: a framework of thought, a social relationship, an institutional act, a social form. In short, the calculation is powerful, but it transforms the objects with which it deals. It does not just calculate; it enacts narratives of what writing, identity, society and culture are all about. Very simple, rather simplistic, but very powerfully applied narratives. The institutional side of these processes is no less important. The elements highlighted above constitute an automated process for production of indexical readings of texts. This process is standardized, industrialized and rationalized in nature. It can, therefore, be deployed in various contexts and used for various purposes. All these operations have gradually given rise to scientific, technological, managerial and expert practices (Grignon 2015). I will confine myself, here, to the treatment of quotations in the field of scientific texts.

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The sociology of science has made great use of quotations (essentially the presence of authors’ names in articles) to objectify networks of affinities, solidarity groups and power relations. The study of the frequency of textual references or bibliometry, a quantitative method belonging to the intellectual field of book study (bibliology), has been diverted and instrumentalized by a project with a managerial aim, “scientometry”, which has taken advantage of the methods of statistical study of references and quotations, perfecting them, to make them an apparatus for describing and evaluating scientific production (Couzinet in Gardies 2011, pp. 167– 186; Gingras 2014). To do this, these scientific projects have been led to develop and refine the semantics of processing by introducing specific forms of reasoning, which are ways of associating value with calculation. For example, someone who is very often cited by many people becomes an “authority”, authors who exchange a lot amongst themselves become an “invisible college”, an institution that concentrates many resources is an “attractor” of intellectual creativity. These calculations are expressed in scores, rankings, indices and graphs. Little by little – and this is what Ginzburg means – we may have the feeling that the quantitative has replaced the qualitative. In reality, it is rather that the former has captured the latter’s claims, giving itself a qualitative scope. Reputation, authority, influence and productivity are normative categories grafted onto indexical calculations. With networked computing, this process can be intensified: it is now possible to mix considerable masses of texts and apply the same calculations, transmutations and stories to them. The technology of the index takes advantage of the indefinite availability of the written trace. Any connection, any link can qualify the intensity of a use, and it is possible to conduct calculation over a network, by giving a higher “weight” to texts that have already proven their ability to attract users and writings. The association of calculation and value spreads from place to place, from a quotation node to another quotation node. However, network computing brings three essential resources to the power of these calculations. First, it creates media of expression and therefore constantly solicits anonymous or ordinary production that multiplies quotations and increases the massive nature of processing, a kind of spontaneous traceability produced by a large number of people; and at the same time it disseminates “turnkey” tools to amateur writers and agency actors (Grignon 2012). Second, it allows authors to “enter” their references in a standardized format and thus ensure in advance a commensurable form of inscriptions, which avoids complex sign transmutation operations and allows the recording and calculation of quotations, their frequency, distribution, topology, on a new scale. Finally, this massive integration of calculations allows the elaboration of more spectacular figures than ever of the presence of the trace and its dynamic manipulation, which is concretized by the portmanteau word data visualization.

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This shift from the corpus of circumscribed texts, which have been produced within the scientific community, to the processing of “clusters of data brands without horizons of relevance” (Leleu-Merviel 2018, p. 235), which have in common only their common membership in the global network, has another effect, probably more important, in epistemological terms. Bibliometrics, with all the limitations mentioned above, calculates the frequency and topology of quotations in a corpus of qualified texts: publications issued by an institution and ensuring the validation of knowledge. The Web, on the other hand, boils everything up. It therefore presupposes a new hypothesis, which I would like to reformulate explicitly here: in an unregulated and open space, without relevance criteria, the calculation still gives access to qualified indices. A risky but daring bet... In reality, this reasoning mobilizes a new narrative, that of “the wisdom of crowds”, which tells us that a very large number of people who do not have any particular competence to judge will judge well, or even better, than a small number of expert specialists. It is this reasoning that leads to the retention as the only criterion of relevance of texts the calculation of abstract marks of the gesture of quotations for a question asked on the most famous search engine. To summarize this grand narrative made up of small scenarios: quoting is a trace of use, it gives access to all types of cultural relationships, the frequency of quotations is a sign of their relevance, the count of quotation operations carried out by the mass of writers is the embodiment of social life and wisdom. To claim, here, to draw a coherent picture from the history of indexical calculations is meaningless, as the dispersion of practices and devices is prodigious. I would just like to highlight a paradox. From the beginning of this process to its current conclusion, the mobilization of the trace schema to serve an indexical interpretation of the text as a trace of elaborate cultural practices is maintained, but its sources, its meaning and its epistemological value are radically transformed. The processing of large numbers of inscriptions, known as “traces” or “data”, does indeed mobilize scenarios that make indexical reasoning plausible. However, these are not explained by the interpreter; they are written inside the machine instructions. Indexical reasoning gives rise to a delegation (Rieder 2006) not only of the calculation but also of the pathways of its results and, in particular, of qualification of the gesture of quoting. This shift of scenarios within the “code” has several important consequences. I will mention two of them here. The first change in the mobilization of the trace schema on computerized media is that the rationality of indexical reasoning is inscribed in advance (prescribed, according to the Latin translation of the Greek program). This significantly alters the temporal aspect of the trace. Of course, the calculations are about what has been,

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but they can only interpret them in the light of what they have been programmed in advance to seek. What they must give. It can be said that the computerized trace is always already a potential datum. Not the untreatable, like Barthes’ photography, but the treatable, because it is programmed to be so. This is even when the tool is placed in the hands of users for them to define its parameters or mode of visualization through the use of programming interfaces (APIs). The computer program that governs the functioning of these applications, before any personal or collective writing, the Ur-text (Jeanneret and Souchier 1999)36 not only defines objects but also anticipates roles, suggests a space of practices, mobilizes “encapsulated” norms and values, and draws “a marked path towards exemplarity” (Grignon 2015, pp. 33–40). The second consequence of this “encapsulation” of the trace schema is its radical inaccessibility. What is called “code” is an object of extreme complexity, impossible for any observer to grasp, including the most expert in programming. A fortiori, the ordinary user is led to construct a representation of the sources of the calculation which is, not incidentally, but necessarily false. The machine performs operations that are unthinkable for all of humanity. Some experts can read lines of code and handle scripts. However, no one sees the entire processing chain. The knowledge of the arche, whose importance and fragility for photography and surveys we have seen, thus becomes definitively erratic here. There remains what Samuel Goyet calls “sourcery”: the representation of a production of the trace by the pure operation of the code (Goyet 2017, p. 473). A kind of bet on what the machine does in the secret of its inaccessible operation. In other words, the imaginary of the machine becomes the only social support for the power to trace digital devices, because users of these results – including those who program them – do not have the means to control and authenticate their true indexicality on a case-by-case basis. These devices, therefore, value code as a pure expression of thought and will by erasing (“invisibilizing”, writes Goyet) the machine’s own mediations, in particular the specific features of computing as a semiotic form and way of thinking. The double figure of the source, which hierarchizes forms by presenting the computer code as the real structure and what is written on the screen as mere surface, and of the command, which reduces writing to a logical operation, thus constitutes a particular mode of presentification of the trace. It seems to directly manifest the power of calculation as a mode of access to the

36 Its importance, radically long neglected by sociological studies, has recently been rediscovered as the “algorithm”. However, this term is not very enlightening, because it isolates and values only the logical and rational dimension of the Ur-text (the algorithm is in fact a particular document, the formal writing of the general structure of a program), whereas the power of the Ur-text also lies in the forms it mobilizes and the relationships of communication it establishes.

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world, while diverting attention from analyzing the transformations that the machine operates, and in particular what in them is beyond humanity. It is actually the handling of visual forms that produces the epiphany effect. The most obvious way to understand Ginzburg’s warning is to acknowledge the coexistence between the considerable weight of this methodological, technological and metrological apparatus and its great epistemological fragility. One thinks of Bachelard, who recalled that “to measure exactly an elusive and undetermined object” is for science a “vain occupation” and who compared “excess precision in quantity” to “excess of the picturesque in quality” (Bachelard 1983, p. 213). Indeed, these methods neglect the warning given above by historians: to use Chartier’s terms (see section 1.2), practice can be sought in the texts, but it cannot be deduced – and a fortiori, I would add, deduced by calculation – because from a practice, one can only grasp, on a massive scale, the determinations. Hence the many questions raised by the spectacular results of the countabilized quotations: what does the frequency of quotations of a text, of visits to a site and of the appearance of a name really mean? What does the act of quoting mean? What is understood about a text when you do not read it but only calculate it? What do the labels of meaning placed on the results of the calculations mean: author, authority, influence, proximity, community? To what extent is a phenomenon verified on a large number of texts relevant to each one of them? Going further, we can observe a paradox. In a way, the technology of calculated indexicality moves away from the historian’s index paradigm, but from another point of view, it does not free itself from it. All the inaccuracies mentioned above are at the opposite end of the scale from the scrupulous attention to detail found in The Cheese and the Worms. The carelessness towards the precautions to be taken in indexical reasoning defines what I call the semiotics of guestimates, i.e. “roughly speaking”. However, it cannot be said that these calculations are irrelevant. They have a degraded relevance. They can only find very summary and banal clues (negligible, says Ginzburg) and attest to their roughly speaking value, for the majority of cases, but for no particular case. The identification of an authority by comparing site visits, hyperlinks to a laboratory, the number of retweets of information or occurrences of an author’s name is of no use to a researcher – or at least that should be the case, as studies do sometimes use it. The same is true of the views score of a video or mentions of a tourist site, but these figures from “sourcery” are very valuable for those who seek above all to reach a mass of consumers in an undifferentiated way or to obtain indicators to justify questioning the productivity of French research.

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What is expressed in this claim to digitally equip research is, therefore, less an instrumentation of the social sciences than a new conception of knowledge of the social sciences that adjusts its claims to the criteria of rigor that traditionally underpin these disciplines, from the project to improve their methods to a competing, even polemic stance (Bigot 2018, pp. 119–164). What is in question is the possibility of dialogue between two scientific cultures in search of interdisciplinarity, but in practice, the considerable expectations raised by the power of technology as such and the announcement of a revolution in personal knowledge through the flood of data lead to the promise of transforming methods: “Any social interaction, whether mediated by a digital application or not, would, therefore, tend today to be ‘traced’ and this ‘new social traceability’ would be made in the form of a vast set of digital data, widely accessible on public computer networks, via website APIs and via services dedicated to the dissemination of digital information. Digital technologies would thus provide an unlimited repository of social data that could be easily and urgently seized for research purposes” (Bigot 2018, p. 172). However, Bigot shows the paradoxical nature of this proposal for collaboration, which in some authors leads to the announcement of obsolescence, at best of the methods of the social sciences, at worst of these sciences themselves. Based on various statements from digital humanities and web science actors, he concludes: “The actors in ‘digital methods’ agree that this profusion of ‘trace data’, which is of major interest to the Social and Human Sciences, escapes them in large part because their ‘traditional’ methods do not allow them to be understood. The social sciences, in the current state of their paradigms, would first be overwhelmed by the massive nature of this new material and would find themselves unable to grasp it” (Bigot 2018, p. 173). If we take a step back from this debate, we may wonder to what extent the proposed index paradigm, understood as a comprehensive reading of texts in search of a culture, is reconcilable with this expectation of personal knowledge resulting from the massive handling of traces. I do not think that the quantitative treatment of signs is incompatible in principle with an approach to quotations based on the consideration of mediations. However, the announcement of a revolution in personal knowledge through a policy of figures, the multiplication of baroque visualizations with a pretension to scientificity and the deluge of data are. Indeed, it is not possible to claim both to show the world in a synoptic way and to claim scientific reflexivity. The semiotics of the guestimate tries to have its cake and eat it too, claiming both measurement and spectacle. To express the claim to produce a synoptic vision of

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society through numbers, it is necessary to refrain from asking questions relating to the mediations of quotations and the link that may unite an inscription to a practice. Finally, the shift from the notion of indexical investigation to the enterprise of massive trace processing is probably based on what Seurrat calls (2018) the willing suspension of critical reflexivity. Seurrat borrows from the poet Samuel T. Coleridge the expression willing suspension of disbelief, well known to literary circles, because it clearly defines the game in which the reader of fiction partakes: to agree not to know that everything is invented in order to experience, as a hypothesis and as a game, a story as if it were real. Seurrat observes in professionals undergoing communications training the need they temporarily feel not to ask themselves questions that may lead them to experience high tension and describes this posture, which Seurrat describes in this case as temporary, as a willing suspension of critical reflexivity (Seurrat 2018, p. 276). In this case, this involves the means of quantifying the effectiveness of communication and its return on investment (ROI) that trainees want to know even if they say that ‘it is not measurable’. It may be thought that, similarly, designers of massive trace processing systems must have a strong critical determination not to choose the solution of hiding from themselves the mass of reasons not to expect from such a calculation a reliable revelation of social mediations. Consent to a willing, or at least implicit, suspension of critical reflexivity and say to oneself: I know, but still (Lambert 2013)... I calculate, is perhaps a condition for continuing this very ambitious undertaking, beyond the multiple evidences of its rupture with the index paradigm. 4.3. Writing in the future perfect We can write the trace schema in the future perfect tense (it will have been), i.e. work in the present, through the production of media texts, so that it may yet be possible, in the future, to be confronted with the presence of traces of the past. This form of writing is not new, but it plays an increasing role at the heart of contemporary changes in heritage. Nevertheless, in order to understand this gesture, we will start from an old and tragic matter of memory. From 1980 onwards, sociologist Jonathan Webber, a professor at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, undertook for many years a painstaking search for all the traces (these are his own words) of the Holocaust in Galicia and the extremely rich past of this Galician Jewish culture that had been reduced to almost nothing. Thirteen years later, photographer Chris Schwartz contacted him to use his information to make a photographic coverage of the remaining vestiges. After years of joint investigation, the opening of the Jewish Museum of Galicia in Krakow in 2004 gave them the opportunity to transform this lengthy investigation, which combines the three canonical definitions of the museum as an institution:

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conservation, mediation and research, into a permanent exhibition. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue entitled Photographing Traces of Memory in which the photographs were accompanied by captions written by their author. After the death of the latter, who, knowing that his time was short, had devoted the last years of his life to this work, his partner published a book entitled Rediscovering Traces of Memory. The Jewish Heritage of Polish Galicia (Webber and Schwartz 2009), which includes these images and texts, enriched with introductions and additional notes, thus giving them a testimonial dimension about the photographer and his work itself – a witness, in short, of an exemplary way to bear witness. This is what Colombo (1986, p. 9) calls “archive of recording”, one could even speak of an archive of the archive. Since its opening, the Krakow Museum has been organized around this permanent exhibition, now entitled An Unfinished Memory, Jewish Heritage and the Holocaust in Eastern Galicia. The exhibition, which is presented by the institution as the heart of its activity, has been increased, since 2012, by a new photographic campaign carried out by Jason Francisco and expanded with a section designed to show the positive evolution of post-communist Poland towards Jewish culture: “[...] To underline the scale of the positive changes that have taken place in Poland over the last years, the name of the final section of the exhibition was changed from People Making Memory to Revival of Jewish Life”. Initiating a typical evolution of the logic implemented by the “new heritages” (Davallon 2016b), the institution is now considering a collection extended to the public: “The photographs will be sourced from museum visitors, members of the local community, professionals and amateurs. With the realities on the ground changing so quickly, only diverse images caught by the participants in these events can reflect the transformations and earnestly document the phenomenon of the revival of Jewish life in Poland”. I chose this example because it brings together all the characteristics of a media production intended, in its purpose and in the definition given by the actors, to make a trace through the patrimonialization of objects not previously identified. Above all, this very deliberate and very reflexive project brings out an explicit problem of writing in the future perfect, i.e. a media production system intended to allow us, in the future, to still see that it has been, to avoid the fact that the past is, at best only fantasized, at worst totally erased. In the foreword to the book, the sociologist points out that the photographer had understood from the outset that his photographs could influence the perception of lived realities in the future, adding: “the condition of

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these traces will continue to evolve in the future, for better or for worse37; but at least, here, we have a statement of how these things looked in our day” (Webber and Schwartz 2009, p. 6). This is an aim that the museum officially takes up in its presentation of the exhibition – and its own institutional role: “Traces of Memory offers a contemporary and thought-provoking look at Jewish Poland, reflecting a great deal of issues and processes rooted in the past, but influencing the future”, as the institution proposes to “educate both Poles and Jews about their own histories, whilst encouraging them to think about the future”38. The project is based on the observation that the traces of the social, cultural and artistic history of the Jewish community are gradually disappearing and are becoming unreadable. It is, therefore, the presentification, not exactly of the past, but of the way in which this past may have appeared in the years following the end of the communist regime, that documentary production, conceived as such, aims to achieve. Constructing a representation device whose form itself is put at the service of this particular aspectuality: “By consciously choosing to document and present these places in colour, Schwartz and Webber depicted them not only as remnants of the past, but also visible and important elements of the landscape of contemporary Poland, highlighting the connected challenges and responsibilities”39. The construction of the exhibition, which is reflected in the structure of the book, emphasizes the plurality of dimensions of this complex interaction between past, present and future, due to five “perspectives” that structure it: sadness at the remains; the highlighting of past creativity; the horror at the process of destruction; the complex contemporary confrontation with this history; and the continuation of the process of disappearance coexisting with the actions of rediscovering the past. I might suggest that it is indeed the poetics of Mnemosyne that is being solicited, here, and used to serve the possibility of maintaining in the future the link between future generations and a culture that is heritage, a victim of destruction and threatened with oblivion through the interplay between the deployment of images, their classification and commentary upon them by captions. What is thus represented is not only what has been but also how it may continue to be, or cease to be, or subsist, cut off from the past. The trace schema is, therefore, solicited far from any illusion of transparency. “What this book presents”, writes Webber, “are

37 We may in fact think that participative museology has a profound impact on the meaning here. 38 From the website text. 39 From the website text.

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contemporary photographs, to show what can be seen today about the past”, observing: “the task of piecing together into some coherent shape the random surviving relics, traces and memories of this destroyed culture is a difficult one” (Webber and Schwartz 2009, pp. 13–14).40 In the way that we observed in section 4.1.3, the difficulties encountered by the inquiry are a source of knowledge about the status of a heritage. I will limit myself here to two examples. Some photographs not only show the degree of survival of the site but also the quality of that survival. It is a question of showing “ruins as well as restorations, absence as well as presence”41. For example, Webber notes: “A restored synagogue that has been turned into a Jewish museum lacks the patina or informality that would normally characterize a synagogue in everyday use, and in a sense such a synagogue, intended for tourists and other visitors instead of local worshippers, can also be taken as a symbol of the destruction, odd though that may sound” (Webber and Schwartz 2009, p. 16)42. A thought which, pushed to its limits – and undoubtedly in its most relevant sense – leads us to consider that photographing the impossibility of photographing concentrates the essential part of this writing of the past combined with the future perfect. For example, a doorframe from which the mezuzah, this extract from the holy texts that was once present, has definitively disappeared, and where only the small slit that served to hold it remains, unnoticed and only revealed by the photographer and his caption. “These traces”, writes the photographer in the caption of this photograph, “disappear as doorframes are renovated, but where they can still be seen they provide a poignant, public statement about the disappearance of the Jews from their original homes” (Webber and Schwartz 2009, p. 37)43. In this case, the photographic campaign and its media developments are the result of a personal gesture by two creators, legitimized and relayed by an institution. It helps us to identify a broader phenomenon, which is not only a matter of private initiative but also of social functioning: the fact that in the context of certain definitions of heritage, the production of media texts is a condition for

40 From the website text. 41 From the website text. 42 We note the use of the term “patina” (borrowed from French) in the indexical value of massive social usage which we encountered in section 1.1. 43 Our translation.

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the possibility of the material existence of traces of the past, rather than having only – which is a lot – the role of conferring on existing objects, preserved and displayed, the status of material traces of the past. This gesture is made in a particular and especially dramatic and violent context of heritage, that of a material culture that is disappearing, and in this case a victim of political violence. Such initiatives are part of the heritage process, as are other more classical or more traditional forms of the gift of heritage. This relationship is shown between generations based on indices of a bygone world, the display of artistic objects or the presentation of ethnological objects. These devices create a visible, sustainable and understandable link to a past of symbolic value, a “world of origin” (Davallon 1999, pp. 227–253; Davallon 2006). However, they do so in a particular way, because the fear of loss, which is the basis of all heritage, is explicitly expressed in a spectacular way before our very eyes and in this case gives rise to the decision to produce a document in the present that is intended to be able to endorse the status of a trace of the past in the future. The gesture of heritage acquires a sort of anticipatory, conjurative character. To study in detail the extreme variety of social logics that lead to this type of communicative process, based on historical changes in culture, as do heritage specialists (Le Marec et al. 2019), is not within the scope of this book. In this theoretical chapter, we will limit ourselves to two questions: on the one hand, we will understand how this particular temporal schema can make sense in the general context of cultural heritage and transmission; on the other hand, we will study, in a particular type of device, the declaration of heritage by the very actors of a culture, the way in which media writing effects the very definition of what can make a trace of culture, value and memory. 4.3.1. Mnemosyne struggling with Lethe Lethe (Ληθη) is the goddess of oblivion, daughter of Discord (Ερις) and sister of Sorrow (Πονος) and Hunger (Λιμος). It is also the name of the river of Hades in which souls can wash themselves clean of what they have experienced. The dialectic of memory and oblivion is at the heart of cultural transmission. Admittedly, the “memorial obsession” and the development of means of preservation (recording, archive, recording of the archive, archive of the recording, etc.) provided by technological media seem to ward off any risk of loss or oblivion and allow a constant reading of the past, so that “in the great sea of memory, the subject feels protected from oblivion”44 (Colombo 1986, pp. 9–11). The most 44 Our translation.

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efficient archives are nevertheless imperfect, because they cannot record everything and, above all, they do not fail to distance themselves from the real as they redouble it in its reproductions. The essential thing is that forgetting is a component of transmission, no matter how well equipped it is. The invention of recording and archiving tools would be nothing without the invention of technologies of memory (mnemonic techniques) which, far from aiming at knowledge without emptiness, take on a “preventive action against oblivion”. They provide a normative, “axiological” function which, in a continuous historical process, selects what deserves and does not deserve to be preserved. Hence, battles for the “inscription” of objects and practices on the heritage “lists” are based on an immense system of knowledge, beliefs and arguments about what deserves to be saved from oblivion (Davallon 2003; Heinich 2009): a process that some objects only elude by making others disappear. To approach this dialectic between memory and oblivion as a technological question is not enough to measure the “extraordinary importance of oblivion, which is the destiny of man, without which man cannot live” (Colombo 1986, p. 85) and, in particular, the profound reasons why oblivion is at the heart of actions designed to produce traces of culture. What is at stake, as Colombo observes for the archive and Davallon for heritage, is the symbolic dimension of the link between the present and the past. To understand it, it is useful to return, very briefly, to the relationships between trace, heritage and memory. In the analysis of patrimonialization, in its ideal-typical form45, Davallon (2006) highlights the important role played in the emerging heritage of objects by all the structuring features of what I have called above the trace schema: the decisive role of indexical reasoning; the shared conviction that something has been; the strength of objects as witnesses to a past; the symbolic operability of the presentification of this past through the gesture of exhibition. One would, therefore, be tempted to say that heritage and trace are variants of the same relationship to the past, which we might name, for example: memory. There are many examples of this assimilation. However, this is a mistake, for three 45 Davallon makes it clear that the model of the heritage process he develops does not presuppose that it would necessarily be actualized or respected in history; on the contrary, as we will see, identifying it in its fundamental features allows us to study its transformations. However, modeling the communicative and symbolic form of heritage allows us to escape two illusions: either to consider that certain objects are by nature heritage objects (that heritage does not result from patrimonialization) or to propose that any object can become patrimonial (that there are no social mediations of the status of a patrimonial object or that any trace is heritage). These two beliefs are indeed supported by one or the other by different actors, but they are inoperative for identifying the process of patrimonialization and especially its historical evolutions and its current questioning.

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main reasons. The first difference is that neither trace nor heritage are forms of memory, because their symbolic and social functioning, structurally based on objects, is different from that of social memory, based on intersubjective interaction. This does not exclude, of course, that heritage contributes to social memory. The second difference is that the trace is a ferment of indexicality, unfulfilled and awaiting possible but not always effective documentary treatment, whereas heritage is a legitimate social object, institutionalized and produced by a regulated process. The third difference, simpler to note, is that if frequently (but not always) the heritage process starts from the identification of a trace, a ferment of relationship to the past, not every trace, far from it, has any claim or title to become heritage, is “patrimonializable”. It is, therefore, better to consider that the phenomena we encounter in the qualification of an object as a trace or as heritage belongs to a more general social and symbolic process, which is the creation from the present of a link with the past. In either case, this process refers to a paradox of our historical experience: the difficulty we have in thinking time starting from our present, in “building a form of continuity between the present and the past” (Davallon 2006, p. 115). From this point of view, it should be recalled that for Davallon, memory, history and heritage, all being part of the effort to build a link between the temporalities of the present, the past and the future, are nevertheless the result of different intellectual and communicative processes. Social memory embodies the continuity of the meaning of practices in social life itself. It is, therefore, when it is broken – when there is loss of memory and oblivion – that recourse to the material traces of this lost cultural life becomes precious: a movement that historical science and patrimonialization each operate, in its own way. In both cases, the link is restored because it has been lost and memory needs to be helped or relayed because what is forgotten has done its work. This loss is, therefore, at the heart of the historical task. However, while the historian restores, at least partially, our ability to explain the world of yesteryear, the heritage institution, library or museum, makes it present. It gives it a communicative scope by ensuring, for the non-specialist social body, the ability of objects to bear visible witness, in our world, to their world of origin. Hence, an exhibition is not an ancillary tool of heritage but a structuring moment in the process of heritage development. A heritage fulfills a role that is not only scientific but also public, symbolic and political. It could be said, in this respect, that a heritage accomplishes in an institutional and scientifically founded form the temporal structure that is fermenting in the schema of the trace: “Things of the past are perceived as coming from the past, as belonging to the past and yet present; it also means that a historical perspective is open, which means that, under certain conditions and under certain circumstances, we are then conscious of being in touch with the past” (Davallon 2006, p. 118).

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In Davallon’s very precise vocabulary, the word “trace” is rarely used in connection with the process of patrimonialization itself. The word intervenes in the discussion, which is also decisive, about the notion of “seniority value” advanced by the historian Aloïs Riegl (1984[1903])46. Indeed, for Riegl, the “value of seniority” refers to the impression and representations that we can develop in the face of a ruin whose character as ancient and marked by loss we perceive – and that we treat as a trace of a past that has been – without being able to scientifically know its historical or aesthetic value. The notion of trace is at the heart of this commonplace symbolic functioning, which, writes Riegl, “retains only traces of seniority”. It is indeed the traces of the destructive activity of nature that “make it possible to recognize that a monument is not recent, but belongs to a more or less distant past; the possibility of clearly perceiving these traces, therefore, conditions the age value of a monument”47. In short, in the terms of this book, the “ancient monument” is an effect of the trace schema, while the “historical monument” is determined by a scientific documentary collection. This commonplace value seems destined to be especially devalued or neglected by a scientific approach to heritage. For Davallon, it is to prevent oneself from understanding patrimonialization. While Riegl tends to bring this relationship to the past back to the grand narrative of man confronted with life and death. He identified a crucial criterion of heritage, its communicative and social dimension. Indeed, the ability of any public to feel connected, in the present, to the past, to experience the presence of the past as the past in the present, is the symbolic background upon which the modern and technological process of the heritage development can be developed. However, we will not dwell on it here – the capture of the trace (ruin, vestige, discovery) is only the first step on the path of heritage as a communicative form and as an institution, because to become heritage, the object must enter into a process of knowledge, legitimization, exhibition, textualization quite different from that of a ruin perceived as a simple trace. To stick to our purpose, let us remember that, from the trace to heritage, the dialectic of oblivion and memory is omnipresent in the desire to preserve what may disappear, in the interruption of social memory and above all in the obligation to preserve and ward off the loss that makes us both recipients and authors of a gift relationship through time (the actors of a “reverse filiation” with the past). I would like to compare this analysis with historical studies on the will to transmit that inhabits the actors of the Enlightenment thought and the designers of its documentary devices. Jean-Marie Goulemot, historian of literature, has identified the importance of the idea of loss within the encyclopedic and archival enterprise as it flourished in 18th-Century Europe. For him, the indisputable optimism of the 46 I have not studied this theory, but I briefly summarize its implications for Davallon. 47 Excerpts from Riegl quoted in Davallon (2006, p. 64).

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conquerors of progress hides a dark side, as the title of his text indicates, “Libraries, Encyclopedism and Anxieties of Loss: the Ambiguous Exhaustiveness of the Enlightenment” (Goulemot in Baratin and Jacob 1996, pp. 285–298). The intensity of the effort to preserve, accumulate, synthesize and transmit culture draws its energy from the acute awareness of the fragility of culture and the violence of history – terrible proof of which is sadly provided by the tragedy of Krakow. He, therefore, describes, with regard to the period that gave rise to the heritage project in its institutional form and the development of institutions of knowledge, a temporal perspective (to use Davallon’s expression) marked by this contradiction. Indeed, “the philosophy of the Enlightenment”, he writes, “maintains complex relationships with the representation of historical time,” developing an “awareness of problematic historical time. This is the basis for the “anxious need for collecting and collection” (Goulemot in Baratin and Jacob, pp. 286–287). The process of accumulation (of places of knowledge, books, objects) goes hand in hand with a growing sense of danger, the two movements joining in spectacular flight in the image of the fire in the Library of Alexandria. In fact, a careful reading of the texts of the encyclopedists reveals the dark counterpart of transmission. The most obvious example is the monumental article “Encyclopedia” in The Encyclopedia, attributed to Diderot (2001, pp. 371–466). In the decades preceding the great deployment of public museums, it is not a question of heritage per se, but of the conservation and transmission of a heritage of knowledge and works for the benefit of future generations. In a way, a filiation not so much reversed as projected, therefore focused on the notion of inheritance rather than that of heritage. However, the latter only asserts its importance to the extent that this intellectual, political and aesthetic legacy, product of long ages and of human labor, threatens to disappear suddenly. It is, therefore, urgent to examine the past and synthesize it. This is a way of consciously and deliberately exercising the obligation to preserve (Davallon 2006, p. 127) and thus hoping to exercise in the name of knowledge a “preventive axiological selection” (Colombo 1986, p. 73) of what deserves to be preserved from oblivion. Indeed, as Colombo explains, sorting, rewriting, purifying and synthesizing texts are necessary to make a heterogeneous body of knowledge into a transmissible object. However, the hypothesis of the loss and misguidance of future generations is indispensable to the strength of this narrative. Diderot thus builds an anticipatory narrative48 that presents the person of future generations (in the terms of the era, the “grandsons”) in a position to be able to turn, either towards progress or towards 48 The expression refers to the analysis of the communicational claim derived from Marin’s (1981, pp. 49–107) commentary on the rhetoric of the king’s historiographer (Jeanneret 2014, pp. 255–266). To put it simply, the production of stories about what must happen, and the exhibition in these stories of expected behaviors, provides a basis for a certain claim to master communication and to make it a political norm.

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error. This has the effect of making it necessary to collect, rewrite and mediatically disseminate a cultural heritage, in the prospective gesture of collecting the past for the benefit of the future. To measure the strength of this temporal schema, it is sufficient to be aware that it constitutes the major structure of the article: “[...] the purpose of an Encyclopaedia is to bring together personal knowledge scattered over the face of the earth; to expose its general system to the men with whom we live, and to transmit them to the men who will come after us; so that the works of past centuries may not have been useless works for the centuries that will follow” (Diderot 2001, p. 371). This suture between temporalities (Davallon 2006) is therefore transformed, under the sign of the risk of loss, into a project to promote a future return to the past. With the idea that it is possible, but by no means certain, that through a gigantic collective production of texts, as Goulemot calls them, through a “book-library”, we can ensure that successive generations – representatives of a world not of origin, but of prospect – are able to grasp this mediation of the past in the elusive present that is always projected further on. Through this media enterprise of anticipated filiation, the editorial team fulfills the obligation to preserve and to transmit (Davallon 2006, pp. 129–154): “that we should not die, concluded Diderot, without having well served the human race”. Or at least they hope to do so, because there is no evidence that forgetting and violence will not triumph. The whole of the long programmatic article is dedicated to this tension and challenge. For example, the collective nature of writing is justified by the urgency of ensuring the transmission before it is too late. 4.3.2. Changes in authority, economy of writings and media genesis of traces The process of writing in the future perfect, which consists of creating media text production devices in the present to provide traces in the future, rather than collecting information only after the event, plays a decisive role in the development of what is now called the traceability of society. It covers a very wide range of fields: the creation of structures exercising a request to express oneself (Labelle 2007) in order to obtain information that can be used in various forms and for multiple purposes; the invention of forms of writing that allow social life, rather than just being described a posteriori, to be captured, at the very moment it develops, in formats that allow both the collection and calculation of indices; the development of collaborative writing programs leading to the claiming of consensual positions, the display of socially authorized representations or the justification of a socially justified decision; etc.

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All mobilizations of the text in a perspective of an instrumentalized and interested future perfect, which would deserve a lengthy analyses. I will confine myself, here, to reflecting on the reasons why writing in the future perfect has developed considerably in the field of memory, heritage and cultural transmission. To address these developments in a problematic way, I propose to return to three essential processes: the role of media writing in the genesis of heritage; the evolution of rhetorical strategies in the media and contemporary challenges to the notion of heritage. As we have seen, the process of patrimonialization has a social and historical life that has founded its legitimization and conditions the questioning of it, which has been very active in recent decades. However, as Cécile Tardy (2010) notes, to observe these changes, they must be linked to the conditions of “heritage writing” in order to draw attention to the mediations of heritage media writing and the contexts in which it is made possible and legitimate. Indeed, heritage is increasingly explicitly thought of as “an object inserted into communication practices that present it, handle it, elaborate it, give it its heritage meaning” (Tardy 2010, p. 13), which it has always been, but in a way hidden by the apparent ontological evidence of heritage objects. It is also a very complex and differentiated range of publications that has long accompanied the invention and recognition of heritage, from publicly funded scientific journals to commercial magazines and periodicals published by various stakeholders interested in these values (Fraysse in Couzinet 2015, pp. 205–227). This question has become increasingly important with the development of “new heritages”, i.e. access to the heritage status of objects that were previously absent from museums, as well as of realities that cannot be collected as museum artifacts: beliefs, ways of doing, landscapes, etc. This denaturalization of heritage reality makes it increasingly crucial and, above all, impossible to deny the fact that “heritage only exists because a process of formation creates specific situations of visibility and readability and because social subjects are engaged in a work of understanding and interpreting heritage in the service of their interest and activity”, in a “process of media construction of heritage where different mechanisms intervene to ensure the visual materialization and social use of heritage” (Tardy 2010, pp. 13–14). In fact, the writing of heritage has always been decisive since this institution was created, insofar as objects alone do not constitute a heritage without their connection to an ideal world through knowledge. “This is why the fact of having inherited a heritage constituted by previous generations must not make us forget the fact that each generation may attribute the status of heritage to new objects” (Davallon 2016b, pp. 1–2).

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However, as Tardy observes, the temporal thickness of these processes of knowledge and communication is very important, since the different modalities of heritage recognition are also different ways of building this link between past, present and future of which we have already seen the importance. Here, analysis of the evolution of media writing meets a more general process, deployed over several decades. Media communication, and in particular the mediation of knowledge in the media, has seen a surge of the poetic from the field of discourse to the field of devices. By this I mean that describing the social world and stating knowledge remains decisive, but that the construction of communication devices, in their materiality, leads to the greater part of innovations. For example, in the field of communication of the sciences, the material conditions of communication and the distribution of roles have changed significantly. Where the model of “popularization”, conceived as a form of informal pedagogy for a non-expert audience, was still taken for granted in the 1960s, the way of defining each other’s roles and the distribution of speech has become the major issue in media work (Babou 1999; Jeanneret in Metzger 2003, pp. 15–32). We can multiply examples of this rise of media poetics from discourse to devices in the field of public communication in science. Television platforms invite scientists to a debate where they are confronted with other actors; instead of relaying inventions, the press gives way to a polyphony of points of view about a public problem in which science is a stakeholder; a logistical complex for organizing “citizens’ conferences” defines the rules and procedures for examining a political decision on the issues of technology; etc. In short, media professionals are increasingly being called upon to write formats for communication, and, therefore, its conditions of possibility, rather than its content. This logic inevitably affects the world of heritage with the development of diversified and more or less sophisticated mechanisms for discussing the heritage value of things, involving a wide range of actors. These elements play a structuring role in the development of inventive and competing forms of writing from heritage to the future perfect. However, these processes related to media writing can only be understood, as Tardy reminds us, in context. In this case, the rise of writings in the future perfect is not unrelated to the way in which the views of political, social and cultural actors towards heritage have been profoundly transformed (Davallon 2003 in Le Marec et al. 2019, pp. 53–75). The most obvious of these changes is the very nature of the objects that have entered the field of heritage, which have become worthy of preservation and considered as representatives of a world, “from cathedral to spoon”, to use Heinich’s provocative formula, as well as the controversies to which these changes have given rise. To crystallize this quarrel here would be of little interest. What is more important is the fact that these redefinitions, often associated with the expression “new heritages” and strongly linked to changes in the norms and mechanisms of media communication as just mentioned, have led to questioning the very ways of

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emergence of the heritage of objects, practices and ideas; first of all the role that the media may play in it and finally, it seems to me – heritage specialists will be better judges than I am – the definition of the temporal perspective in which the link between past, present and future is reconstructed through cultural transmission. We must return to what principally distinguishes a heritage object from a simple trace: the fact that its character as an indication of a world of origin has been recognized, explained and authenticated by a scientific authority. However, the development of a new heritage (ecomuseums, museums of society, so-called intangible heritage, i.e. linked to practices, representations and knowledge, post-colonial heritage) is accompanied by questioning the criteria, procedures and actors capable of authenticating their value. Indeed, the corpus of traditional heritage objects is inseparable from the institutions that have guaranteed their value and the hierarchical systems to which they are linked (Poulot 1997). However, in the case of an “immaterial heritage”, the source of knowledge about objects and more broadly the ability to recognize the world to which they belong is not historical research, but the lived experience of community members: “In the case of tangible heritage, the relationship is based on an object having physical contiguity with its world of origin, whereas in the intangible, even if [...] the relationship is established with a manifestation necessarily having a material dimension, it depends on the relationship between that manifestation and the ideal manifested object whose transmission is essentially memorial and experiential” (Davallon 2016b, p. 3). The many studies that highlight the link between new heritages and new norms of heritage give a precise idea of the intensity of the challenges to the ideal-typical model of heritage guaranteed by scientific expertise: the rise of a model of the “polyphonic exhibition discourse” in Quebec museums, a society that is currently working on the issue of the cultural dignity of the “First Nations” (Soulié in Meunier 2012, pp. 231–248); differences over the definition of Caribbean heritage in cultural institutions belonging to different countries and histories (Pajard 2017); the complexity of negotiations necessary to initiate an inventory of Guaráni culture acceptable to community members and sponsoring institutions (Pianezza 2017); etc. This “veritable earthquake” (Davallon, in Le Marec et al. 2019, pp. 53–75) does not mean that anything can become heritage or that the process of heritage development has lost its importance. However, the authorities and the paths of heritage development are shifting, which, paradoxically, has helped a world that tended to essentialize the act of conservation to become aware of the genesis of heritage. Today as in the past, it is a question of:

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“[…] a construction which, as a cultural process, is a largely communicative fact: if only to establish this relationship to the past (and, therefore, to the future), its initiators must convince both their own social group and authorized bodies of its interest. It is a question of moving from discovery and social interest in the object to the production of personal knowledge, giving rise to very diverse types of documents, which may form the basis for recognition by the social or political body which is able to declare it heritage” (Davallon, in Le Marec et al. 2019, p. 57). Beyond borrowing from scientific fields that are not traditionally museum managers, such as ethnology, the official recognition by UNESCO, since 2003, of an “intangible cultural heritage” effects not only the scope of what can be considered as heritage but also the legitimacy of the actors who can decide on it. These changes give unprecedented importance to writing in the future perfect, to the point of making this type of documentary production the core of the heritage process for three essential reasons. The first is that creating a collective and concerted writing device is required by the political guidelines of UNESCO’s inventory of intangible cultural heritage which, according to these normative texts which determine international support and financing, must be based on practices, democratically negotiated and free of hierarchical relations. The second factor in the creation of these writing devices is that documentation is particularly central to this process, since a heritage does not consist of a collection of unique works, but of words, practices and objects that are (metonymically) specimens for the culture to which they bear witness. The third phenomenon at stake is that practices, representations and beliefs constitute a wide range of objects of a very diverse nature to be preserved, so that the design of innovative media devices has a particular opportunity to be deployed, here, to define ways of collecting, elucidating and recording these composites. Indeed, heritage enhancement is always based on identification of a link between objects, practices and knowledge. However, here, it requires: “[a] technical operation, characteristic of the patrimonialization of intangible objects, by which a heritage fact is first recognized (in principle by the social group), then described in its intrinsic and/or customary characteristics on the basis of the way in which these are identifiable in its manifestations [...] either by recording these

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manifestations to preserve them, or by interpreting the traces present in the group’s memory” (Davallon 2019, p. 63)49. In extreme cases where a heritage consists of practices threatened with oblivion, only members of the community that bears the culture concerned can define the reference world of objects and gestures: “Only cultural practitioners or those who are familiar with their relationship with the heritage object [...] are able to establish the link between the heritage and the cultural body that is at its origin, based in particular on a personal knowledge of memory that allows them to identify the body that produces the ideal heritage object” (Davallon 2016b, p. 9). In short, it is not enough to inscribe the so-called “intangible” heritage, a composite of objects, practices and representations, on a list, and it cannot be collected but must be written and even in a certain way made to speak. What is particularly decisive in this context is that the temporal perspective that defines the gift of heritage is profoundly reworked and perhaps challenged by this collective writing process of a form of invention of today’s heritage for the future. Far from unfolding where social memory is broken, as is the case in the standard ideal of reverse filiation, the process of building heritage, systematically carried out with and by the actors, consists of some way in fixing this memory, still alive but fragile and threatened, in order to preserve it from the future loss to which it seems destined. The temporal schema of the trace is deeply affected by this: “It is not surprising that it is in the interpretation of memory that, in the end, we seem to find the definition of what can still create heritage in the actualization of the object, thus countering its possible degradation by providing the guarantee of ‘patrimonial’ conformity (if one can say so) of this actualization. In other words, it is the “knowledge” resulting from the processing of memory [...] that would guarantee the continuity of heritage. Continuity – and durability of the ideal object, particularly in its link to culture – which result from an ever-renewed patrimonialization, even though de facto this same object may evolve and adapt to present conditions” (Davallon 2019, pp. 63–64). 49 This analysis is based on a study of the relationships between the autographic dimension of objects (their specific singularity, simply put) and their allographic dimension (their ability to preserve their value in reproductions, linked to the knowledge necessary for the recognition of the object). It is not possible here to repeat this analysis, which the reader can consult (notably Davallon 2016) because it is decisive.

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It is clear how this constantly renewed process of heritage development brings about a certain plasticity of mechanisms of communication, a questioning of cultural authorities and a displacement of knowledge involved in the recognition of heritage and in the decision to preserve certain objects – in this case, certain practices and traditions. The rise of writings in the future perfect, most often collaborative, therefore, lies above all in the fact that a new symbolic economy of legitimate objects places in the hands of social subjects the fact of making the patrimonial decision, in a way, as a precaution, in the present for the future – for the future destiny of what, being precious today, could stop making traces tomorrow: “By attributing to the social group the power to recognize what constitutes heritage for it, the definition of intangible heritage, as formulated by UNESCO, has shifted the centre of gravity of patrimonialization [...] for intangible heritage, [its] point of origin lies in the group’s recognition of the heritage character of the object, even if, in practice, the modalities of such recognition prove to be neither simple nor uniform” (Davallon in Le Marec et al. 2019, p. 66). The shift from the it has been to the it will have been is, therefore, fully accomplished when the present is transformed into the world of the origin of the project to perpetuate a cultural form. It is also the ultimate achievement of the emerging trace of the text, since the trace, traditionally the initiator of the heritage process, is in this case the outcome. Under these circumstances, it cannot be ruled out that implementation of the institutional programme for collecting the intangible heritage of a little-known, dominated or threatened community may to a lesser extent have the purpose – or at least as the effective result – of ensuring the gift of heritage for the future than to catalyze in the present, in the very process of drawing up the trace, the sense of belonging, the expression of culture and attachment to it (Pianezza 2017; Pajard 2017). Under these conditions, the vitality of social memory (Gondar and Dodebei 2005), the fact that it is able to escape the loss that threatens it, would be the real challenge of these new writings in the future perfect, at the cost of a new enrolment of the cultural institution in promoting a conception of cultural identity (Chaumier in Eidelman 2005, pp. 21–40). This is reflected in the fact that these projects often present themselves as producers of memory, rather than heritage. An original socio-anthropological form, in short, of the poetics of Mnemosyne. 4.3.3. Memorial writing in devices These projects are translated into many mechanisms that have the common feature of authorizing (Candel 2007) practices of collective writing: setting up projects to inventory a community’s heritage, platforms for collection of memories

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and resource packages to carry this out. The project to train non-expert scribes is at the heart of this gesture, which both institutes and instructs: thus, the “Memory Lane” project50, which federates projects for writing collective memoirs, organizes meetings, disseminates training and maintains a research file; or the very many brochures produced by institutions in partnership with activists involved in these projects to develop and transmit, in the form of “kits” (Seurrat 2009), methodological advice and good political and ethical conduct for those who would like to become involved in the creation of such projects of writing in the future perfect. For example, the brochure Aide-mémoire: petit guide de collecte des témoignages à l’usage des associations (“Aide-memoire: a small guide to collecting testimonies for the use of associations”), a document accompanying the collection of oral archives published by the Musée Gadagne de Lyon and the Municipal Archives, explains: “In order for the data collected to be integrated into the resources of heritage institutions, ‘collectors’ must comply with a number of rules. The purpose of this guide is to make them known to those who would like their work to be known, disseminated and used by researchers working on our history and all interested citizens.” It addresses questions such as: how to define the purpose of the collection? Based on which ethical principles? How to conduct an interview? What is the purpose of collecting other documents? What to do with the data collected: identify, classify, inventory, store, etc.? What are the main legal principles to know? If this work of animation, institution and regulation of writing is taking place, it is because the actors are aware of the stakes of these writings in the future perfect, as well as of the extent of the methodological and documentary knowledge at stake. Indeed, in parallel to these collective projects, in addition to the collections provided by isolated amateurs, there are initiatives of a completely different nature, such as the huge collection, exhibition and publishing company led by Yann Arthus-Bertrand under the title 6 milliards d’autres (Arthus-Bertrand 2009) (Six Billion Others) on behalf of the Good Planet Foundation that he manages or the program for publishing books by Pierre Rosanvallon, Le parlement des invisibles, which have very different objectives and standards. However, case studies conducted by the researchers show that the definition of spokespersons, communication situations and methods of recording the results of inquiry raise considerable issues of culture and power. Finally, it is not surprising that these changes give rise to shifts in the use of the various media that are supposed to be able to perform such a function of living memory. The list, the ultimate form of inscription (see Chapter 2), but associated 50 Available at: http://www.passerelle-de-memoire.fr. Accessed December 12, 2018.

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with the rejection of a fixed conception of heritage, first gave way to the considerable expectations of computer archives: that of creating an archive that is constantly updated and flexible. Digital technology, much in demand in the form of the collaborative and dynamic writing device Wiki (Severo and Philipponi 2017) was supposed to be able to magically combine this memory of living culture still in progress with the lasting virtue of the archive. This goes as far as threatening to make the temporal elaboration of heritage vanish into a kind of perpetual present. Then, “audio-visual recording” regained its traditional status as witness par excellence of the social world (Colombo 1986) to the benefit of an interactive, living and exhaustive conception of the trace. For example, in the field of collecting testimonies on Guaráni culture in Brazil (Pianezza 2017), audio-visual documentation is seen as a panacea of the “intangible heritage paradigm” because of three specific properties that are attributed to it, a little, to parody Barthes, as if we were capturing an essence of the audio-visual: fidelity to the real, the ability not to freeze heritage but to set it in motion the reflexivity that the shooting of sequences is supposed to inspire in community members. As Rémy Besson and Claire Scopsi (2016, p. 13) observe: “Whether it be filmed testimonies, handling of objects, capturing repetitions, reconstructions or more complex animations, the memories of individuals and the records of groups are, here, often thought through the image in motion. Digital video in particular is omnipresent without being really analyzed as such. It is still too early to determine whether this type of format corresponds to a persistence of the audio-visual period in the digital age or whether it is a mode of mediation adapted to such a media environment.” The caution of the diagnosis formulated by these authors is that these new poetics carry conceptions of documentary media engineering (Seurrat 2018) that deserve to be identified as such. They are undoubtedly based on the experience of the actors, as well as on conceptions of the everyday that circulate in society and on the claims of digital audio-visual actors to enter the world of heritage mediation (German 2017). Hence, a critical approach to the process of documenting and mediatizing practices and knowledge, based on a concrete examination of the requirements of responsible writing in the future perfect, is at the heart of the reflections of actors and lucid researchers. However, this is another matter that deserves another book.

Conclusion It has been. It is here. It will give

This book is intended to shed a problematic light on the issues currently faced by a society of traces. Theoretical and historical hindsight makes it possible to question current events on the basis of concepts capable of dispelling their apparent obviousness. Indeed, nothing has naturally predestined things to be what they are today in a world where the efficient production of irrelevant traces dominates. Nothing proves that this situation will continue in the future. Nothing forces us to resign ourselves to it. The trace is a paradoxical object. Indeed, no object is naturally a trace. What exists are perceptible objects with irregularities which the observer can identify. Qualifying these objects as traces is the result of an interpretation. The trace is therefore a sign and, in addition, a sign that has a very complex interpretative regime and may be produced in different ways, some very sophisticated. Yet the trace is not usually perceived as a sign, but as a simple natural object. It is often placed at the origin of technical use and the production of meaning and very seldom approached as a produced object, very little theorized. It always seems to be at the origin of our relationship with the world. Among the extremely diverse range of objects that receive the status of traces, those which are disseminated by the media have a very different mode of production and existence from those of the physical phenomena which humans encounter in their direct experience of the natural world. Assimilating both in an oversimplified way would be an adventurous metaphor. In fact, these media objects (recordings, inscriptions, writings) are the product of social and technological mediations. The nature of these mediations, in particular their symbolic logic and their material implications, which differ greatly from one system to another and from one situation to another, has a major influence on the way in which the trace is given to us and

The Trace Factory, First Edition. Yves Jeanneret. © ISTE Ltd 2020. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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on the relationship it maintains with the realities to which it can testify. On the contrary, any mediatization of practices and representations produces knowledge, stances and values. It testifies to the realities it represents and also to the uses of the media itself. Finally, the mediatized trace is a communicative gesture. It reflects practices in the context of a relationship with the aim of addressing a recipient. It is, therefore, never a pure recording of reality but creates a gesture and a sign. All this makes trace analysis very complex and requires, in order to understand its status and mode of production, that we use not a single concept, but a constellation of categories. As we have read, these categories have multiplied; in reading different authors, we have focused on identifying the production of traces: imprint, inscription, writing, text; sign, index, interpretation, authentication; medium, mark, traced-out features, shape, form, format, frame; recording, retention, memory, filiation; practice, use, norm; representation, manifestation, presentification, etc. Among the authors who have made the effort to devote a theoretical analysis to it, from historians to media studies, from analysts of drafts to pedagogues, the trace marks less the place of an object than a questioning and an investigation of the means of accessing cultural and social practices, notably those that are less obvious and less legitimate. The trace is therefore not a scientific concept, but a composite cultural being, mixing several types of reality, and which, very poorly defined, plays an important role in the genesis of representations of culture and society, and in the creation of mechanisms that seek to produce and disseminate knowledge about it. The omnipresence of the traces of the social world produced in the media therefore places the researcher who wishes to describe and analyze them in a complex situation. What we must do to understand such a profuse and heterogeneous production is not so much define in an abstract way what a trace is or should be but observe the life of traces in social life. It is also necessary to take into account both the observable processes (social, technical, semiotic) through which the trace is produced and the imaginaries and belief systems that give it its value and power. In particular, all traces that circulate in society and in the media, however well equipped and quantified they may be, are not – far from it – methodically obtained and scientifically controlled representations of reality. In many cases, their efficiency, i.e. the power of influence they have acquired and the trust they enjoy in society as mechanisms for representing the world, takes precedence over their relevance, i.e. their ability to report on real phenomena. Many trace processing devices and many imaginaries related to the trace circulate in society without having provoked critical evaluation. The existence of many trace production devices with high efficiency and limited relevance is a phenomenon that anthroposocial sciences, whatever they may think of such devices, must take seriously.

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However, there is an interpretative schema of the trace that can be described, even though it is both complex and embodied in a wide variety of processes and devices and for multiple purposes. To grasp this schema, it is necessary to take into account both indexical reasoning as a form of interpretation of signs and the particularity of the trace as a concrete configuration of experience. A trace is first and foremost a mark, in the case of the media an inscription, which is considered as an index of a practice or a social form. Analysis, therefore, requires taking indexical reasoning seriously and understanding its extreme complexity. The founding paradox of the trace is its indexical nature. The index is both an object in a real relationship with other objects and a sign capable of representing them. It is a very particular object that somehow straddles the world of things and the world of signs, since, if correctly interpreted, it reveals real phenomena and not just imaginary or conventional ones. The trace interpreted as an index thus affords us a way of making sense and representing the world around us, which is not only a matter of language symbols but also of causal and objective relationships. This comes with the proviso that, whatever its function may be to reveal objective phenomena, facts, the index is the most difficult sign to interpret, the most charged with uncertainty and subjectivity in its interpretation, the most enigmatic. In short, the trace touches on the structure of reality, but this latter does not reveal itself. If qualifying an object as a trace implies that it reveals a real phenomenon – a trace that one would not assume is really, and not optionally, as Barthes says, linked to what it designates would not be a trace – the path to the latter passes through the observer’s activity of interpretation. The trace speaks to us of causality, but it establishes meaning. However, if there is anything that is not common sense, it is the idea that the trace may be obscure, speculative and indirect. We have the impression, on the contrary, as Benjamin writes, that with the trace, we grasp the thing. This is an erroneous judgment in terms of informational processes but commonly verified in terms of social experience. The mode of existence of the trace contradicts its semiotic functioning. This contradiction is essential to understand, because the paradox lies in all the devices used to produce and interpret the trace, from photography to data visualization. A lucid analysis of the place of traces in society must, therefore, resign itself to this initial paradox: the reality revealed by indices is particularly difficult to identify, but their interpretation disappears behind their obviousness. However, the indexicality of the trace is not sufficient to define the trace schema, as not all indices are traces, and traces are not ordinary indices. Trace is an object inscribed in a materiality that we perceive in our external environment and that we endow with a particular potential of meaning, the virtual capacity to confer on an absent, but postulated past, a certain perceptible presence in the present. This can be analyzed in three main components: first of all, its aspect, a particular temporal schema, which requires that the trace be interpreted by returning it to a historic (preterit) past which,

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nevertheless, becomes present by it, in a present perfect mode of an it has been. This is a mode of expression of this relationship to the past, not through narrative, but through presentification, a representation in the present and in the concrete form of the sign, in the mode of visible and sometimes tangible manifestation. Its mode of existence is one of a ferment of meaning and information, a promise of indexicality to develop. The interpretation and documentation of the trace, a potential indication of the past manifested in a current object, projects it into the future. In addition, the mediatic inscription of the trace, for example through photography, gives it the opportunity to reproduce, repeat and disseminate itself. The schema of the mediatized trace thus includes a very complex temporal structure associating, around its dominant aim of seeking a past, the dimensions of recall, fixation, projection and availability. It is this experiential and interpretative schema of the mediatized trace as a recording of what has been that is particularly highlighted by Barthes’ analysis, rather than the social and technological functioning of photography in its real complexity. Indeed, photography occupies in social representations and in the history of media use the place of a technological archetype of the trace. It provides both a striking image and an ideological model for thinking of any instrumented device for producing traces, including those based on very different technical operations, such as measurement, statistical calculation, schematization or digital processing of forms. The task of critical research on these devices is, therefore, faced with a new paradox. On the one hand, it must break with the reduction of any technical process to a summary image of photography as pure recording in order to really study the complex engineering of the media and the mediations upon which their claim to indexicality is based. On the other hand, it must take into account the fact that, in terms of social knowledge, such a stereotype of photographic technology as capturing the real in the form of direct viewing, the optimal method of presentifying the indexical power of technology, serves as an interpretation of all these processes. The analysis of the great diversity of media devices for producing traces and in particular their very active contemporary design therefore requires precise study of the media that ensures that media objects have the character of witnesses to a past, gives this past a presence and makes it a ferment of interpretation and documentation. Indeed, from one device to another, info-communication processes are not the same, their historical genesis is different, the mode of production of signs and that of their interpretation vary, they do not presentify the absent and the past in the same way, and they do not base their claim to represent the social world on the same bases.

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It is not reasonable under these conditions to claim to formalize a general model of mediatization of traces. On the contrary, we can identify five spaces of mediation, too often neglected by theorists of an industry of traces, which objects in our environment must traverse, in one form or another, to become media traces. They are part of a framework or device, i.e. not only an apparatus, but also a social, technological and symbolic whole that conditions relationships of communication. They are textualized, i.e. integrated into sets of significant material forms, adapted to the properties of the various media, inscribed in a context of meaning and interpretable by society. They are presentified by a representation, which has the power to make present and visible something that is inaccessible and invisible, which imposes a certain stance and a certain point of view upon us and moreover is often forgotten as a mediation built to appear as an exploration of the real. They are accompanied by knowledge (and ignorance) circulating in the social world about the functioning of devices, which are very important because upon these is based the meaning that society can give to media products and the trust it may have that they are indeed traces of its own functioning. Finally, media engineering is able to create standardized formats that have the ability not only to collect existing inscriptions, but also to facilitate, solicit and stimulate social expression, the delegated and distributed production of traces of what people do, say and desire. Writing enjoys, in a way similar to photography but different, a privileged status in the production of traces. An image embodied by a physical trace on a medium, writing is often called the “written trace”. The frequency of this formula in discourse of all kinds indicates that writing is the prototype of the gesture of inscribing information and memory on a medium. For its detractors as well as for its defenders, it marks a rupture in communication and thought. It externalizes the latter, fixes it on a medium, allows it to circulate and thus detaches itself from its author and the situation in which it was developed and opens it to all kinds of re-appropriation. It is the driving force par excellence for a logistics of the commonplace. There is a great temptation to reduce writing to this function and to make it above all the recording of acts, made permanent and socially available by recording. The glorification of the process of externalization of thought and the role of non-human actors in technological philosophies amplifies this trend, as does the efficiency of circulation of inscriptions in the media. However, thinking of writing as a trace is a bias. The written trace is the semiotic expression of a primacy given to the logistical dimension of culture, a bias strongly asserted in contemporary systems of producing traces the social world. Consideration of what has been “traced-out” (tracé in the original French expression of the term) gives writing a thickness that goes beyond the mere ideas of inscription and recording. In fact, what has been “traced-out” implies the encounter of a graphic gesture with an inscription device and introduces the dimension of the material forms of writing that not only record reality but also structure its analysis

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and perception. The writing gesture involves the mediation of media and the technical modalities of graphic production, from the ductus gesture directly affixed to the medium to the mobilization of modeled and pre-designed forms. This combination of gesture and tool, which has been greatly modified over the history of innovation of a symbolic system that is also a material technology, conditions the nature of the relationships between the written product and the practices of which it may be the index – and thus, symmetrically, the way in which the written word can make a trace for those who observe it or submit it to a process. In addition, this gesture is part of a culture which has developed over the course of history and is conveyed by discourses, figurations and norms. The written inscription is, therefore, an indexical object marked by the complexity of its genesis, by the discontinuity of the communication process and by mediation between the practice in action and the forms it takes on the medium, making the reading of traces very complex. The heterogeneity of these forms, the importance of the contexts in which writing is produced and validated, the complexity of the writing gesture itself and the thickness of norms, institutions and actors make indexical reading and authentication of writings particularly delicate, as shown by the examples of signature and draft. These considerations confirm the importance of the historically acquired role of the written word as a prototype of the trace of various cultural, political and social realities; however, they clearly indicate that understanding the written word from the side of the trace is one possible perspective among others on writing that is neither natural nor unique. Debates among writing theorists show the importance of other dimensions of writing, such as symbolic, reflexive and creative. Above all, they reveal the central contradiction between, on the one hand, conceptions of writing as recording and trace, turned towards the past, its conservation and reproduction and, on the other hand, writing as a living sign, creator of a particular vision of the world, addressed to a partner, and turned towards the future and dialogue. This issue is not only theoretical, but also reflected in the alternative between surveillance and emancipation in politics and cultural life, as well as in the risks of automatic processing of our writings as traces from which it is possible to argue that we always repeat the same gestures or those performed by everyone else. This tension unfolds and intensifies when the more global question of the conditions under which all productions circulating in the media, media texts of all kinds (words, sounds, images, gestures, codes, etc.) can become traces of practices, representations and social dispositions, even when they have not been produced for this purpose. Indeed, all media texts fulfill a double function: to bear witness to social life (testis text) and to give it its form or its texture (textum text). They make visible the realities we live – that our ancestors lived – since they grasp them and transmit an image; however, they can only do so because they structure the visibility of the social life within themselves.

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These two definitions of the text, on the one hand as a shaping of society and culture (an invention tool), and on the other hand as a collection of social indices (a tracking tool), give rise to two alternatives that we have been able to explain and that remain structuring. First alternative: to look at the texts as traces in themselves, not traces of something that should be precisely identified, but creations that circulate in space and time and allow the re-appropriation of a memory of forms and its constant metamorphosis, i.e. the poetics of Mnemosyne; or to consider the text as the trace or a set of traces of something specific that must be identified, as a means of accessing through it a reality located outside of it, such as practices, a social order and mentalities, i.e. indexical inquiry into the social world through texts. The second alternative: there is more than one way of engaging in indexical inquiry, between focusing the attention on textual forms, mediation of texts, ways of interpretation and symbolic value and focusing on its submission to calculation, its reduction to elementary forms, its submission to standardized and machine delegated scenarios of interpretation. Finally, the practices, modes of interpretation and tools for producing traces are profoundly heterogeneous in the way they give meaning to objects, and also in the way they deliver an interpretation. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think that none of them could free themselves from the whole issue that has just been briefly mentioned here. The most automated, computationally demanding, efficiencyoriented (at the expense of relevance) devices of trace production and interpretation identify marks, apply indexical reasoning, rely on scenarios of practice, build a relationship to the past in the present, take advantage of the circulation of inscriptions and capture and create traced-out features, forms and semiotic modalities for presentifying reality. They may do it in a summary, unquestioned, invisible, naturalized, roughly speaking manner, but they do it. For this reason, understanding what these tools really create requires that they be analyzed from this conceptualization of the trace. The reader will have understood my wish that the analysis of trace production devices should take advantage of these questions more than it generally does today. However, there are three issues that I have only partially addressed in this book, and which seem to me to be gaining in importance today. The first is the relationship between the different levels of cultural and social life, which I have mentioned in this book in a rather allusive way: objects, gestures, customs, practices, processes, representations, values and dispositions. It is clear that indexical inquiry has easier access to some of these entities than others (they are classified above approximately from the most physically observable to the most dependent on complex scenarios). To me, it seems important to study more precisely the way in which contemporary devices move from one sphere to another. To take just one example, interpreting the number of hyperlinks to a site or the frequency of

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exchanges of posts as a trace of intellectual authority seems to me to engage a flat and unified conception of the social world, in which mediations disappear because all spheres of social and cultural life correspond and are commensurable. Nevertheless, it is of no coincidence that the calculation of the most elementary level of culture, an operation on a medium, is interpreted with the category that expresses the strongest cultural claim and authority. It seems to me that the presence of conceptions of the relationships between gesture, practice and culture is important in current changes. We might think, for example, that a roughly carried out analysis of Menocchio’s readings, by measuring the relationship between what is written and what he says about it, would have fairly quickly led simply to the conclusion that he did not understand anything about the books he was reading. I would next like to highlight the fact that the history of innovation in media devices and forms is marked by a new paradox. On the one hand, the processing undergone by signs is increasingly sophisticated and mobilizes more and more mediations of the material, semiotic, computational levels. On the other hand, this process is increasingly invisible and incomprehensible, both because the mediations do not take place in a space accessible to the user and because the user is not in a position to construct a fully adequate idea of the processes that objects undergo. As Cleo Colomb (2016) wrote , “digital traces […] meet the technical requirements of computational machines. They are imperceptible to humans and, therefore, always escape them, at least in part”. The impossibility for us to claim to understand and evaluate the processes of production of social indices places the knowledge of the arche (the representations we have of the functioning of traceability devices) in a very strange situation. We do not have the means to exercise critical reflexivity over them or even to have adequate representation. Some tell us that these tools work above, below, next to or within the Web, but this an imaginery that does not give access to a problematic of indexical inquiry, the manipulation of inscriptions or the forms of representation. At the same time, we cannot fail to build for ourselves a representation of what the machine does. Under these conditions, the relationships between what is highly visible (maps, graphs, curves and various visualizations) and what is very invisible (the nature of practice scenarios, transmutations of signs) define new politics of the invisible (Jeanneret 2001b). Finally, it would be interesting to deepen a reflection on relationships between the schema of the trace and our relations with temporality, what François Hartog calls “regimes of historicity” (Hartog 2003). The trace, as we have seen, is an index of the past that offers a ferment of interpretation for the future. However, as Marin writes about the map, a representation device is “simultaneously the trace of a remnant past and the structure of a future to be made” (Marin 1994, p. 206). Some projects – it is not general, but increasingly frequent – are moving towards a shift, or even a reversal, of this balance between the present, past and future, to a prioritized concern to open a temporal perspective towards the future. We were able to study a

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figure of this shift from the schema of the trace with writing in the future perfect, translated into quite ambitious devices of collecting traces intended to be regarded in the future as representatives of a world of origin which, far from being lost in oblivion, is contemporary to us, but threatened – so think members of the community and activists of these archives. In this book, I have not had time to mention another figure of this shift, very different in its sources and the issues it raises, to which I plan to devote more precise research, the tendency to shift interest from traces to data. When we pay attention to it, what we sometimes call, in various books on the powers of the “digital”, traces, sometimes data, are not different objects, but the same objects viewed differently. This is not, once again, about how methodical reasoning can be used to rigorously define what a datum and a trace are in informational processing (Leleu-Merviel 2017). It is a shift in the construction of the relationship to time, in the appearance of informational objects. The same object, described as a trace, is oriented towards the capture of past events and practices, whose indexical reasoning can elucidate nature; described as data, it is torn from this past, detached from its history (Labelle and Le Corff 2012) and subjected to processes that can make it something. The trace guarantees that it has been; the data promises that it will give. Data, like the trace, enjoys a certain immediacy. It is supposed not to have been produced, but to be there. As Dominique Cotte said in a conference: “these are materials for study that can take extremely varied forms and there is a kind of doxa that summarizes all this under the name of data”, which “gives all this material a prior status, an ex ante status and which obliges us to position ourselves in anticipation of what will happen” (Cotte 2016). The future orientation of data is in line with the regime of design, whose project is less about tracking down the signs of the past than about sketching a future society. It is undoubtedly within the framework of this regime of historicity, that of acceleration (Rosa 2010), that the discourse on data tends to replace the announcement of a society of traces. The it has been, in short, is becoming something of a has been. These changes should not be underestimated in terms of time, to use Davallon’s expression. However, the trace has not uttered its last word. Data is data only because it claims to testify to something that is, if not always gone, always inaccessible as such. It is, therefore, also index, presence and ferment. Data could well be haunted by the ghost and the phantasmagoria of the trace which it claims to replace.

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Index

A, B, C aggregate, 22, 24, 153, 207 aim, 3, 19, 21, 49, 50, 95, 113, 120, 123, 134, 143, 147, 150, 168, 187, 190, 192, 208, 214, 227 apparatus, 50, 52, 60, 62, 67, 69, 71, 74, 76, 91, 112, 144, 146, 208, 211 arche, 82, 84, 210, 238 archetype, 56, 57, 60, 62, 89, 91, 102, 116, 142 archive, 13, 127, 143, 144, 167, 176, 214, 217, 218, 230 aspect, aspectual, 4, 5, 37, 47–50, 52, 53, 56, 71, 90, 91, 99, 156, 164, 167, 209 attribution, 12, 16, 42, 103, 132, 139, 184, 192, 223 authentication, 11, 24, 55, 65, 71, 82, 116–118, 122, 192 authority, 25, 185, 211, 222 available, availability, 91, 102, 144, 183, 193 belief, 5, 22, 24, 26, 28, 68, 81, 95, 174, 192

book, 1–3, 8, 9, 11–15, 17–19, 21, 23, 26, 56, 60, 62, 74, 77, 80, 83, 88, 90, 92, 97, 99, 101, 103, 129, 135, 137, 138, 141, 146, 153, 158, 160, 161, 165, 180, 182, 184, 186, 192, 193, 198, 200–204, 208, 214, 215, 217, 220, 222, 230 capitalism, 103, 111, 157 category, 3, 18, 21, 22, 27, 28, 35, 36, 38–40, 46–48, 79, 93, 97, 100, 101, 104, 109, 110, 124, 132, 136, 165, 185, 206 challenge, 14, 22, 28, 54, 62, 107, 110, 118, 128, 139, 145, 150, 163, 169, 189, 193, 199, 213, 224, 228 circulation, 2, 8, 9, 21, 24, 47, 58, 72, 74, 91, 101–103, 113, 117, 127, 135, 144, 165, 179, 205 code, 25, 37, 40, 60, 95, 137, 151, 209, 210 collect, collecting, 1, 5–9, 49, 56, 59, 69, 72, 73, 83–85, 89, 100, 102, 105, 111, 112, 115, 117, 120, 123–126, 131, 143, 150, 154–157, 159, 161, 163, 166, 172, 173, 175, 180, 183, 185, 199, 202, 206, 214, 221, 222, 226, 228–230

The Trace Factory, First Edition. Yves Jeanneret. © ISTE Ltd 2020. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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community, 19, 162, 228, 230 competence, 70, 81, 82, 209 constraint, 18, 19, 110, 124 criticism, 4, 12, 22–25, 27, 49, 51, 54, 63, 69, 95, 97, 98, 102, 109, 119, 120–122, 124–126, 132, 134, 135, 161, 165, 167, 172, 178, 179, 182, 190–193, 195, 197, 198, 213, 230 cultural being, 1, 2 curve, 25, 26, 61, 65 D, E, F data, 3, 15–17, 22, 25, 33, 34, 40, 49, 50, 53, 70, 84, 110, 138–140, 210 delegation, 85, 94, 180, 209 device, 9–11, 13, 18, 26, 27, 52, 56, 58–62, 65, 69–74, 76, 77, 79–84, 86, 89, 90, 104–107, 109, 111, 112, 115, 130, 141–143, 150, 153, 154, 156–158, 160–166, 168, 171, 173–176, 178–180, 188, 214, 215, 217, 218, 226, 230 diaphoria, 44, 101, 117, 129 digital, 22, 33, 34, 58, 73, 76, 93, 106, 113, 127, 128, 147, 181, 184, 212, 230 discipline, 18, 64, 77, 103, 116, 119, 142, 148, 164, 166, 198 document, documentation, 4, 8, 9, 16, 17, 24, 33, 34, 43, 71, 74, 76, 81, 87, 89, 98, 101, 102, 116, 127, 140, 141, 147, 148–150, 163, 173, 176, 178, 185, 187, 188, 192, 199, 210, 214, 217, 226, 229, 230 economy, economic, 23, 62, 70, 77, 78, 82, 83, 99, 102, 121, 133, 141, 144, 165, 183, 185, 194, 208, 222, 228 efficiency, 3, 21, 24–26, 59–61, 69, 72, 83, 110, 114, 130, 143, 206 emblem, 114

engrave, engraving, 103, 155, 156, 168, 170, 172–174 enigma, enigmatic, 5, 8, 15, 39, 124, 138, 155 enunciation, 63, 78, 85, 127, 148, 165, 180 epistemology, epistemological, 22, 23, 24, 27, 29, 32, 62, 156, 164, 170, 175, 176, 196, 209, 211 ethical, 18, 53, 110, 186 event, 17, 26, 48, 66, 74, 76, 80 ferment, 48–50, 52, 56, 156, 184, 185, 196, 219 figure, figuration, 7, 17, 19, 23, 24, 27, 41, 48, 60, 75, 86, 108, 111, 113, 146, 147, 151, 167, 168, 172, 178, 203, 210, 213, 230 form, 6, 9, 12, 16–18, 21, 27, 37–40, 43–45, 48, 52, 54, 56, 61, 63, 65, 66, 68, 71–76, 83, 87, 89, 91, 95, 96, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, 107, 116–119, 121–123, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 132, 134–138, 141, 153, 155, 156, 158, 160, 161, 163, 165, 167, 168, 170–173, 178–180, 182, 186, 188, 195, 198, 199, 201, 203–205, 207, 208, 210, 212, 213, 215, 216, 218–221, 223, 224, 227–229 format, 16, 19, 70, 84, 107, 117, 126, 127, 144, 146, 165, 180, 189, 208, 230 future, 120, 136, 149, 213–216, 222–224, 226–230 G, H, I genesis, 29, 37, 70, 78, 82, 83, 87, 90, 91, 98, 104, 108, 117, 121, 127, 130, 135, 139, 147, 150, 195, 223, 225 genetic, 29, 63, 82, 116, 119–121, 123–125, 127, 129, 150, 155 genre, 6, 11, 66, 190, 222

Index

gesture, 5, 8, 9, 20, 48, 50, 62–64, 66, 69, 73, 78, 83, 85, 87–90, 104–132, 137, 155, 157, 160, 162, 163, 166, 168, 175, 176, 178, 186, 188, 190, 203–205, 209, 211, 213, 216–218, 222, 229 grasp, 2, 3, 22, 23, 25, 47, 49, 50, 68, 70, 89, 106, 124, 166, 220, 222 grosso modo, 84, 116, 202, 211, 212 guide, 9, 11, 23, 137, 148, 188, 189, 201, 229 heritage, 213, 214, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 230 heuristic, 14, 163, 169, 180, 189, 203 history, 5, 8, 12, 13, 15–19, 38, 54, 72, 75, 88, 92, 103, 106, 109–119, 131, 146–149, 154, 156, 158, 160, 163–165, 167, 170, 175, 178, 179, 181, 182, 184, 188, 190–195, 203, 209, 213, 215, 218, 219, 221, 229 icon, iconic, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 65, 75, 110, 140, 153 image, 7, 8, 20, 40, 45, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 63, 64, 65, 70, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 89, 90, 93, 95, 97, 103, 105, 110–112, 118, 126, 127, 133, 137–142, 144, 155, 158, 160, 161, 168, 172–178, 180, 230 implicit, 19, 127, 185, 213 imprint, impression, 9, 11, 39, 41, 44, 47, 48, 63–67, 69, 82, 105, 108, 111, 117, 130, 140, 155, 162, 168, 220 index, indexical, indexation, indexicality, 3, 5, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16–21, 25, 33–50, 52, 55, 56, 61, 63, 65, 66, 69, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77, 83, 90, 105–107, 110, 115, 116, 118–126, 128, 129, 133, 140, 155, 164, 167–170, 174, 183–200, 203, 205, 207–209, 212, 213, 216, 218, 219, 225 industry, industrial, 10, 16, 19, 68, 84, 90, 113, 143, 154, 182, 186, 187

261

information, computer, 1, 4, 16, 17, 21–23, 25, 34, 35, 50, 54, 61, 64, 71, 72, 74, 81, 85, 90, 91, 93, 94, 106, 107, 109, 112, 113, 126, 127, 131, 136, 140–142, 149, 151, 152, 176, 184–186, 188, 192, 201, 203, 206–208, 210, 211 innovation, 10, 11, 19, 62, 73, 92, 94, 179, 182 inscription, 3, 8–10, 14, 16–20, 22, 25, 32, 34, 47, 64, 66, 77, 83–85, 89, 90–94, 97–139, 144, 168, 170, 178, 185, 188, 189, 203, 204, 213, 218, 229 institution, 118, 130, 153, 157, 198, 199, 203, 206, 208, 209, 213–216, 219, 220, 223, 228, 229 instrumentalization, 90, 111 instrumentation, 56, 103, 111, 140, 184, 212 interaction, 16, 19, 51, 73, 80, 100, 105, 110, 113, 136, 204, 212, 215, 219 interpretation, 5, 8, 10, 14, 17, 19, 22, 25, 28, 33, 34, 37–52, 56, 59–65, 67, 70–73, 76, 78, 81, 82, 108, 110, 113, 116, 119, 120, 122–124, 126, 128, 130, 139, 144, 151, 153, 155, 156, 161, 166, 174, 183, 184, 186, 189, 191, 192, 194, 195, 197, 199, 201– 203, 207, 209, 223, 227 invisible, invisibility, 43, 81, 143, 183, 208 K, L, M knowledge, 2, 5, 28, 35, 48, 53, 55, 58, 67, 72, 78, 81, 82, 84, 87, 89, 90, 100, 108, 115, 120, 127, 131, 133, 136, 141–149, 154, 160, 165, 170, 173, 180, 184, 185, 193, 195, 197, 204, 210, 213, 216, 218, 220, 221, 224, 225 leitmotiv, 5, 34, 48, 50, 51, 54, 56, 60, 62, 69, 113, 174, 197, 221

262

The Trace Factory

logistical, 74, 93, 94, 97–99, 101, 102, 104, 114, 115, 130, 131, 133–135, 146, 162, 168, 183, 224 map, mapping, 25, 62, 65, 78, 81, 88, 151, 177 material, 4, 10, 13, 17, 24, 37, 50, 60, 64, 66, 80, 90, 93, 94, 109, 113, 120, 125, 127, 134, 144, 152, 153, 156, 159, 160, 162, 163, 168, 170, 176–181, 187, 204, 225 matrix, 28, 55, 84, 189 matter, 4, 5, 8, 9, 19, 20, 55, 91, 107, 150, 153, 164, 181, 200 media, mediatized, mediatization, 7–13, 16–18, 26, 34, 54, 56, 59, 67–71, 73, 74, 77–79, 81–86, 90, 97, 103, 105, 107, 109, 111–113, 131, 144–147, 151, 157, 161–166, 171, 175, 177, 179, 180–188, 206, 214, 217, 222–224, 230 mediation, 4–11, 18, 20, 28, 51, 52, 58, 61, 63, 64, 72, 82, 83, 90, 94, 95, 105–109, 114, 125, 126, 128, 130, 132, 143–149, 158, 161, 164, 173, 177–179, 204, 205, 214, 222, 224, 230 medium, 8, 9, 18, 20, 35, 60, 63, 66, 73, 74, 80, 84, 85, 90, 91, 93, 99–101, 105–107, 112–114, 116–118, 122–127, 129, 132, 134, 135, 137, 138, 140, 146, 152, 153, 158, 161, 167, 172, 178, 180, 187, 204, 206, 210 memory, 7, 64–66, 88, 92, 93, 94, 121, 134, 148, 149, 150, 154, 155, 168, 172, 173, 174, 181, 202, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 219, 220, 223, 227, 228, 229 metamorphosis, 49, 106, 136, 158 metaphor, 20, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 74, 78, 101, 103, 168, 186 metrology, 152 model, 19, 23, 35, 37, 40, 46, 51, 59, 60, 70, 72, 93, 102, 116, 117, 137, 170, 171–173, 179, 188, 194, 218, 224, 225

N, O, P narration, narrative, 8, 45, 49, 61, 75, 78, 87, 89, 174, 182, 185, 195, 196, 202, 203, 209, 220, 221 network, 5–9, 17, 24, 85, 87, 88, 94, 98, 109, 110, 112, 120, 143, 153, 174, 183, 208, 209 noema, 51, 53, 56, 63, 67 norm, 9, 221 operability, 78 paradigm, 14, 34, 70, 73, 92, 139, 143, 170, 184, 186, 189, 190–199, 203, 204, 211–213, 230 paradox, paradoxical, 2, 19, 31, 34, 35, 46, 47, 54, 59, 68, 79, 81, 96, 99, 120, 124, 127, 139, 147, 193, 198, 209, 211, 212, 219 past, 12, 18, 48, 49, 52, 53, 57, 65, 104, 124, 125, 136, 138, 156, 159, 163, 167, 186, 213, 215, 217–219, 222, 224, 225 photography, 9, 10, 26, 28, 39, 40, 49–77, 80–82, 89, 90, 91, 104, 105, 108, 158, 177, 178, 194, 210 platform, 7, 8, 83, 183, 186 poetic, 44, 73, 89, 97, 138, 144, 154, 165, 167, 170, 171, 175, 176, 179–183, 189, 193, 199, 200, 215, 224, 228 political, 18, 21, 23, 24, 26, 40, 42, 58, 59, 61, 98, 110, 112, 119, 130, 131, 143, 144, 150, 156, 174, 187, 189, 195, 198, 212, 219, 221, 224, 226 polychresia, polychristic, 149, 205 popular, popularity, 12, 14, 188, 198, 201–203 preference, 31, 110, 123, 170 present, presentification, 4, 5, 13, 23, 47–49, 52, 54–56, 68, 78, 80, 81, 87, 92, 101, 104–108, 120, 122, 125, 138, 143, 148, 149, 151, 156, 159, 160, 163, 164, 169, 175, 181, 183, 195, 207, 210, 213, 215–220, 222, 224, 225, 228–230

Index

primacy, 40, 51 problem, problematic, 3, 12, 13, 15–18, 21, 25, 35, 46, 55, 65, 69, 73, 79, 126, 127, 144, 157, 161, 163, 164, 166, 175, 179, 180, 184, 214, 221, 223, 224 procedure, 27, 106 process, 2, 3, 8–19, 22, 23, 27, 28, 35–40, 43, 46, 50, 54–77, 82, 85, 91, 94, 101–109, 113, 115, 120–128, 131–133, 143–145, 150, 152, 154, 164, 165, 168, 169, 172–178, 182–188, 191, 205, 207–209, 215, 217–230 program, 19, 124, 150, 172, 182, 197, 198, 206, 209, 210, 228, 229 prototype, 91 publish, publication, publishing, 3, 5, 6, 9, 11, 12, 17, 58, 69, 72, 75, 120, 123, 125, 127, 129, 155, 158, 165, 172, 174, 177, 179, 180, 183, 185, 188, 190, 192, 206, 229 R, S, T read, 7, 12–14, 20, 48, 58, 75, 76, 83, 88, 105, 106, 110, 114, 115, 122, 125, 127, 130, 136–140, 149, 161, 165, 183, 186, 191, 193, 196, 201, 202, 204, 205, 210 readable, readability, 33, 106, 122, 139, 143, 161 reading, reader, 2–4, 9, 12–20, 28, 31–38, 42, 50, 56, 65, 69, 70, 80, 90, 93, 95, 97, 98, 101, 105–116, 120–128, 131, 137–139, 145, 150, 154, 158, 160–162, 169, 172, 175, 180, 182, 183, 186, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195, 196, 198–207, 212, 213, 221, 227 recording, 50, 51, 53, 60, 61, 63, 67, 69, 72, 82, 85, 91, 93, 100, 101, 104, 114, 116, 118, 122, 144, 147, 150, 151, 167, 189, 206, 208, 214, 217, 226

263

reflexivity, reflexive, 9, 25, 46, 73, 122, 149, 190, 214 relevance, 3, 21–28, 31, 60, 61, 68, 71, 72, 83, 92, 94, 96, 110, 130, 139, 154, 176, 178, 179, 196, 203, 206, 209, 211 representamen, 37, 38, 40, 52 representation, 2, 8, 9, 11, 18, 19, 27, 33, 34, 37, 45, 53, 54, 56, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 69, 70, 71, 75, 77–81, 84, 101, 104, 112, 131, 134, 144, 145, 151, 155, 158, 159, 165, 174, 189, 194, 210, 215, 221 scenario, 8, 24, 128, 184, 206 schema, 3, 15, 18, 25–31, 34, 47, 50, 51, 54, 56, 60, 63, 68–71, 77, 81, 87, 90–92, 101, 104, 115, 118–123, 130, 138, 148, 149, 151, 156–160, 164, 166–170, 176, 180, 190, 195, 209, 210, 213, 215–220, 222, 227 science, scientific, 1, 2, 3, 21, 23–25, 43, 45, 61, 62, 70, 72, 76, 77, 99, 119, 121–124, 130–132, 159, 165, 166, 172, 174, 179, 180, 192, 193, 203, 208, 209, 211, 212, 219, 220, 223–225 secondity, 40 semiotics, semiotic, 11, 21, 25, 27, 31, 33–43, 46, 47, 50, 52, 54, 56, 57, 61–69, 77, 84, 86, 96, 97, 101, 105, 107, 113, 115, 117, 118, 121, 123, 125, 127, 130, 132, 134, 180, 185, 194, 195, 210, 211, 212 sign, 5, 8, 14, 15, 21, 31, 33–55, 59, 61–65, 68, 71, 77, 81, 84, 90, 96, 102, 116–118, 123, 128, 132, 133, 138, 139, 151, 152, 156, 159, 169, 170, 179, 183, 184, 186, 189, 209, 222 signature, 88, 116–118, 130 space, 4, 27, 50, 58, 74, 77, 81, 83, 96, 100, 102, 106, 110–113, 120, 123, 125, 126, 128, 135, 139, 142, 144, 148–150, 155, 157, 160–169, 172, 174–176, 178, 180, 181, 184, 189, 204, 209, 210

264

The Trace Factory

survey, 26, 57–62, 64, 65, 69, 70, 81 symbol, symbolic, 37–46, 50, 55, 90–96, 100, 102, 103, 106, 108, 110, 115, 121, 122, 132, 137–140, 146, 152, 181, 187, 201, 206, 216–220, 228 technology, 95, 109, 136, 143, 180, 208, 211 testify, witness, 25, 35, 49, 61, 67, 76, 106, 116, 120, 125, 136, 183, 184, 188–190, 219, 230 text, 14–17, 19, 20, 23, 25, 43, 44, 45, 50, 54, 63, 64, 67, 69, 70, 73, 74, 76–78, 80, 88, 90, 92, 94, 95, 100, 103, 105, 108–114, 120–130, 134, 135, 138, 140, 151–154, 161, 162, 169, 170, 179–189, 191, 193, 198, 200, 201, 203–207, 209, 211, 221–223, 228 tourism, touristic, 5, 7, 9, 10, 23, 27, 151, 188, 189, 201, 211 trivial, triviality, 23, 25, 26, 29, 98, 103, 220 U, V, W uncertainty, uncertain, 19, 22, 24, 28, 83, 121, 129, 162, 165, 173, 192 Ur-text, 210

use, 4–10, 13, 16, 18, 20, 22, 23, 25, 35, 47, 67, 71, 75, 79, 81, 85, 87–92, 107, 112, 113, 115, 128, 142, 143, 161, 165, 169, 170, 180, 183, 185, 186, 189, 195, 199, 204–206, 208, 209, 216, 223, 226, 229 value, 8, 9, 16, 17, 22, 24, 25, 28, 45, 46, 50, 55, 61, 64, 68, 71, 74, 78, 92, 93, 94, 96, 104, 115, 117, 119, 121, 124, 126, 129, 131, 134, 136–138, 155, 170, 175, 188, 196, 205, 208, 209, 211, 216, 217, 220, 224, 225, 227 visible, visibility, 8, 64, 79, 88, 90, 111, 117, 121, 126, 174–176, 188, 195, 215, 217, 219 writing, 3, 9, 20, 25, 27, 28, 34, 61, 63, 67, 72, 74, 80, 85, 87–89, 90–103, 105–108, 110–112, 114–116, 118–144, 146, 147, 149, 150, 154, 161, 175, 180, 182, 186, 187, 199, 204, 207, 210, 213, 214, 216, 217, 222–224, 226–228, 230

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