La Planete des Esprits--Pour une Politique du Cyberespace (review)

Philippe Quéau is a thinker as well as a man of action. In the 1990s, he organized the exhibition Imagina, which centered around digital images. Since July 1996, he has been director of the Information and Informatic Division of UNESCO and has written many theoretical essays on the issues of technological art and virtual reality.

In La Planète des Esprits—Pour une Politique du Cyberespace, Quéau presents a political and philosophical reflection on globalization, based on a philosophical questioning of the virtual. The author claims that a new historical age—the World Renaissance—has arisen, heralding a planetary civilization. Like the Western Renaissance in the 16th century, the World Renaissance has its own writing, which is digital or virtual and succeeds printing. It also has its own America—cyberspace and the worlds of financial abstraction— and its own reform, the concept of a common world good.

The foundation of this renaissance is the invention of a new system of writing—the virtual—based on the development of communication and information technologies. The author invites us to define the virtual not only as a tool for a better understanding of the real, but also as a civilizing agent, allowing for new modes of behavior. He sees the virtual as a matrix of a new civilization that will succeed "material" civilization. In fact, the virtual relativizes the categories of classical reason— space, body, vision—and forces us to reconsider our ontology. For example, one must renounce a spatial and localized conception of being; in virtual reality one is not where one stands physically, but where one acts and feels. The consequences of the virtual affect the very foundation of being human and thus open new possibilities for human communities. Quéau posits that the virtual may help the virtual community of humans to represent themselves as a planetary society, thus developing the ultimate utopia of the virtual. Nevertheless, he does not forget the dangers of the virtual in relation to the question of otherness—here, the virtual is used only as a mirror of ourselves.

Although globalization and the virtual are abstractions, they are real for those who believe that "ideas rule the world." Quéau argues that the fortune of the world depends on the reality we lend to abstractions, making reference to the ancient scholastic debate between nominalism and realism regarding the concreteness of abstractions. A similar problem exists in terms of a concept of a common world good, which Quéau seeks first to define more precisely in order to develop it into a political tool. He analyzes the various world public goods—water, the oceans, space—and is especially interested in immaterial goods, such as the Internet and information society, in a broad sense. He proposes different measures for guaranteeing these common world goods. For example, he advocates creation of a virtual public world library and wants above all to demystify international law, which, he writes, is too heavily based on nation-states and not enough on a world-oriented, supranational vision. Quéau here makes a link (along with other theoreticians such as Hervé Fischer) between his thinking about the virtual to a broader perspective of planetary civilization by emphasizing the relationship between the virtual and world politics. In so doing, this book is very useful in the actual debate on globalization. This debate is essentially economic, as recalled in Pascal Bruckner's The Misery of Prosperity (Paris, Grasset, 2002) and only rarely seeks to define the ethical and political conditions necessary for a world civilization. Globalization has always been of interest to sociologists and political scientists and only more recently to philosophers.

One may criticize in this book the fact that the author ties the question of globalization too closely to the problems of the virtual or the question of otherness, thus marginalizing the question of geography in comprehending globalization. Even if the virtual produces another space...