Today everything is networked, as much in society and its technologies as in imaginations and epistemology. The omnipresence and omnipotence of the networked must be questioned both as a concept and as a social representation. The critique of the rationale of the network makes it possible to define it as a connection of spaces and an interworld between the technique and the body. The genealogy of the concept highlights its plasticity: it has taken successively the living body, then the nature, and finally the society in its clutches. Now exhausted, the concept of network degrades into a technology of the mind that has become a catch-all.

The critique of the network’s ruse and trickery brings to light the ambivalence of its imaginary alternating communication and surveillance. The Network’s horizontality is often opposed to the Tree’s verticality in order to define the future of institutions and even the future of societies. The imaginary of the network is the bearer of a techno-utopia that promises social transformation through technology, starting with the Internet.

The combination of the reason and the cunning of the network, that is to say the tying of a paradigm and a technological utopia, founds the great contemporary narrative of the network that we have called “retiology”.

Simultaneous translation : Marie-Louise Diomède