A) Conditions of perspective

This study intends to examine the way in which an institution manages its Grey Literature at the current time, so remarkable for its development of Information Technology. This technology is endowed with such an interactivity nowadays that it deserves the general designation of cybernetics (networks, digitalization, interactivity looking towards an effective artificial intelligence). The institution I examine is old and well organized. It is an establishment of the Red Cross which is at some distance from the decision-making centers, in the countryside, and is barely computerized. It has a good tradition of files, memoranda, advertisements, postings, tables of activities etc... With cybernetics, this tradition ages like red tape, and we are working towards an identification of a new function, known as Grey Literature.

I begin by cataloguing and detailing three elements: the object of this study, then its goal, and thirdly its conditions.

First the object of this observation. It concerns itself with the identification of GL in a Medico-Pedagogical Institute. This is an institution which brings together care-givers, teachers, and users, the latter mentally (or socially) handicapped children.

The goal of my activity, in this place and in my capacity as doctor, is that of health. I understand by this term in particular the health of the members, and in general that of the institution. In this regard I must mention my earlier studies and researches, which focus on the health of social bodies. It is thus in relation to an integral health and sanity that I perform an analysis which observes, in the reciprocity of the individual and the collective, the function of GL.

Thirdly the conditions of my work are characterized by my medical specialty which is that of psychiatry – that is to say that in my engagement for the health of the bodies, whether social or individual, I necessarily include the function of psychism. Moreover, within that specialization, focusing on psychoanalysis, I consider especially the image of the body which is formed in human reflection, relying here on modern conceptions which attribute to this image – which one calls imago – an extreme dependence on language. Now, according to these modern conceptions, language, thus considered, is most strongly structured by the Letter – which is to say, when all is said and done, by literature.

We may thus gather together the conditions and terms of my observation:

Shat which one calls Literature – or textuality – in the institution which I am analyzing, presents itself in a manner intimately coordinated with the psychism of its members, it is in the dependence between psychism and the body that I am required to maintain my deductions. I can thus set the departure point of my work and project with the linkage Literature>psychism>body and the following proposition: the activity of psychic care in an institution provides the occasion of examining or verifying the link between literature and the identification of the body.

There remains to be seen how this link between literature and the body reveals itself in the light of technological progress. From the perspective of the body we know, for example, that in our times its definition refines itself considerably with an identification of an individual body according to the criteria of a genetic code. On this basis, which lends itself to a comparison of chromosomes with a sequence of letters, ecology often invites us to make a connection between the biological codes and those of the environmental niches, which the social order strives to reproduce in symbolic context. It is on this level that we find literature, properly speaking, which, in its turn, returns to the level of the code under the effects of its cybernetic treatment. We know now that it is the emergence, treatment and objectification of Grey Literature that indicates an aptitude on the part of literature to respond to a logic of code.

Therefore, reconsidering at present the Psyche, because we have isolated the code, that is to say the regime which brings into direct relation individual body, social organization and literature, we are able to examine the framework of confinement of this triple combination, of person, group and textuality, which constitutes this institution called Faidoli.

This establishment was principally an internat – an in-patient service -- for many years. It thus represented a closed space where the children lived during the week. One often thinks of such places as a second family, but above all symbolically as a mother, holding her children in her bosom, in her womb. It was during this year 2003 that an important transformation affected this internat; in phase with the effects of the modern world, an essential part of Faidoli transformed itself into an out-patient externat.

It is in the midst of this transformation from an internat into a Service of Care in the Home (called SESSAD) that I present my study of the identification of Grey Literature. Now, instead of living, eating and sleeping in the institution the children reside normally with their families. And, inversely, it is the educators and care-givers who visit them, in their homes and schools. The children have separated from the mother, or matrix, who used to contain them. The connections between the institution and its members have psychically inverted themselves, with the matrix now on the outside -- similar to when children are born and the mother comes to them.

Such a reversal can be expected to affect the literature in this SESSAD. According to the strong link we see between the human body and the symbolism as the individual and his world – through the media of psychism as Mother, environment, language – a large set of significant combinations will provide occasion for translation into its textuality. We call it the phantasm, and further, it is by the distinction of its Grey Literature that one sees how this textuality becomes a complete part of the identification of the body.

Yet we must be cautious; it is always necessary to measure the risks and difficulties of such a view of the human identity. If cybernetics nimbly invites us to equate body and text -- as the image virtual reality suggests, we sense at the same time that this leap into a pure world of code may be only a dream – and since, practically speaking, this establishment is only very minimally computerized, we sadly do not have an abundance of indicators to objectify in terms of networks, programs or procedures. Hence we cannot measure how closely an improved health relates to a functionalized Grey Literature.

But on the other hand the necessary prudence and indigence of the circumstance present a situation suitable for the release of theoretical propositions.

B) What is Literature

The topology of the framework and its bodies having been identified, we can now bring to it the final element. We have to start with a question: how does GL integrate itself into a definition of literature in general? It is a current question; Dominic Farace reminded us of it recently à propos of the grey literature in the networks, and the difficulty it has leaving them. On this point psychoanalysis can bring its brightest lights to bear. In effect, the analysis of psychism since Freud has taken the direction of a theorization that combines it more and more with linguistics. By hypothesizing an Unconscious it suggests a conception that the Cartesian ‘ego’ of the human person results from a hypnosis whose roots are found in the Letter and alphabetization. I recall two/three notions: the historical source of psychoanalysis is the phenomenon of hypnosis, which Freud decided not to practice, but to study; it was from this moment that he suspected that it was a phenomenon essentially linked to language; and following his observation of dreams, jokes and lapses he identified this link in the effects which the Letter, in practice reading and writing, imposes on language.

Since the ‘ego’ which forms civilization is a reflection of the effects of the Letter, the work of a psychoanalyst assimilates itself to that of a linguist. Hence, in reciprocal relation, psychoanalysis brings its contribution to the general linguistics of literature, and in its turn the theory of the nature of literature enlightens psychoanalysis. Here in the form of an aphorism, is the basis of this reciprocal relation:

But the usage of aphorisms comprises a limit – just as language which, the more clear it becomes, the more ambiguous it is; we hardly know how to doubt it, we who suspect that the perfect semblance of an achieved literature, edited, proprietarized and commercialized, hides, in some sort of inversely proportional manner, a literature grey and pregnant with an essential truth, possibly repressed. Thanks in particular to psychoanalysis, one understands that the dazzle of the letter in the meaning conforms to the fact that one cannot, by holding oneself to the letter alone, distinguish between lie and truth. To break this duplicity, which appears also as the sort of trickery between literature and propaganda, scientists know the solution under the name of algebra.

The founder of Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, already formulated the rudiments of this algebra in his science. His description of the sliding of the significand over the signified is well known:

Psychoanalysis has continued to develop these formulas by allying them to cybernetics. Thus it presently proposes the following formula to clarify the definition of literature – which constitutes the fundamental diagram. It is the schema L (‘L’ for Lacan, if you like, as it was he who introduced it to Freudism) – it is also called formula Z – which describes how the Saussurian significand hooks the signified meaning (lower level), in spite of its slide (upper level) which seems structurally to detach it indefinitely.

Schema L.1: This formula exposes the narcissistic relation (see: relation imaginaire – imaginary relation) of the human relation through which a structure (see: inconscient - Unconscious) tends to signify itself (A), by alluding to a Subject (Es) whose reflection (a)’ it would be.

In fact the schema L is essentially inexact because – since it deals with a formulation of cybernetics: it is dynamic and must change when writing itself (this writing takes the form of the four discourses of which Mr. von Hofe spoke). One remembers the classic example of cybernetics: two machines which each react to the reaction of the other and in this regard realize a perpetual instability. This imprecise but fertile mislaying of the action in its effects expresses itself mathematically in the famous figure of the catalogue of catalogues. For the mathematician it may have to do with the cipher zero and, for the librarian, with the grey literature in the inventory of his library – adding for the latter the practical anguish, when he becomes aware that the cipher has materialized in his library with the introduction of cybernetics. The schema L proposes itself to describe this vital knot of irrepressible instability which literature supports, and how cybernetics reveals it:

C) Study of the distinction of GL in the experience of SESSAD

We can now return to the institution SESSAD, to test this formulation of literature in a concrete case. By the side of the old and large internat, SESSAD provides care to twenty children. The team that provides care and education consists of twenty persons. It was launched in September 2003, only a few months ago. In these days of December 2003 we can only see the inherent instability of beginnings, which masks the cybernetic instability inherent in its embodiment of GL. My testimony and my interpretation respond to the following two levels I can observe: a first level which is start and facade, and is created by the resistance which the analysis of psychism necessarily arouses. The second level which also always offers itself, beyond this resistance, is that of theory, in the present case of the nature of GL.

Let us begin with the resistance aroused by the inception of change; in its opening period, SESSAD had counted on receiving a computer program to manage its GL. After many months and in an inexplicable manner, the organization which was to deliver it, has addressed only the documentation and mode of use, but not the diskettes or the program. Secondly, in the very days of its opening, the institute Faidoli repeated a general failure to equip itself with a computer program for outside communication, Internet, or other mode of communication between SESSAD and its supervisors.

The character of an entrenched citadel, in a period comparable to a flood where the prophet Noah gives the lead to his daughter Knowing, testifies to the resistance with the fact which psychoanalysis has already made it possible to bring to light:

It is known indeed that the tension between individual and collective psychology has held psychoanalysis, faced with the barrier of the transference, in immobility. The analysis of the neurosis of transference concludes with this parabola: the discovery of the Unconscious presents the risk of denaturing the ego in a Collective Unconscious – against which the parade veers in the other direction of confinement in the transference, which gives place to the death instinct. If things are comparable, literature, discovering cybernetics, risks denaturing the private life and the rights of the person – against which the false parade into isolation, with only an intranet, risks turning the grey literature to black, as transference turns to the profit of Thanatos.

Since this is not a course on psychoanalysis I cannot detail the much debated logic of the Transference and its certification of failure. For this reason I exposed it in terms of a parabola. I exposed it in any case because there would be no way to have a theorization of GL without the notion of the barrier of resistance. It is only then – as when one, by breaking the sound barrier, separates an object from its noise – that one can, in the silence that lends itself to study, analyze the theoretical corpus of GL.

D) the body in the institution – held in grey literature

One can recognize the nature of GL by that which motivates attraction to or fear of cybernetics. In psychoanalytic terms one asks: what is the object of desire which corresponds to cybernetics? From the perspective of Literature, a first opinion comes naturally in response to the question: the desirable object of literature is knowledge. Is it for this reason that one finds resistance to the grey form of this literature? One can understand how a knowledge in rough draft, uncertain or even erroneous, poorly controlled or deceptive, sets in motion an affect of rejection, for fear of losing or harming this ideal knowledge. However, this first opinion is put in question again when cybernetics informs us that, on the contrary, its goal is to effect an ordering of this confused knowledge. We must thus admit that it is some other motive than ignorance which motivates contempt and rejection of Grey Literature. It is precisely in the formulas of cybernetics that we are able find this hidden motive:

When we take up the series of L-schemas, 1, 2 and 3 above, and evaluate this series with regard to its psychic formulation – otherwise called optic -- we find again, at the place of GL, that which corresponds to the most biological basis of psychism.

Model O: the Optic Model shows in the form of vase/containing and the flowers/contained
the psychic imagoes and their physical correspondents in a mirror game analogous to Schema L.

We have already remarked how, faced with an Ideal literature (formerly called white), grey literature presents itself as materia prima, veiling in the envelope or form of temporary and non-commercial media, a rough object (a), identified in psychism as object of desire. Now all the trivial sexual histories of the human person remind us of the resistance as much as the necessity of recognizing that completed envelope with its object as the other’s body. So many neuroses and perversions oblige us to ask if we know exactly what we wish to say when we are speaking of our body. The premises of Virtual Reality have prepared us to consider the type of form with which we identify ourselves – up to the extravagance of clones, and genetics to finish, whose finger points to the heart of the enigma that constitutes the body. At this heart of all perspectives, psychoanalysis shows that the body delegates its form to an ideal ego – which, we believe, depends on an environment. – “Bathe a body long enough in water”, Darwin will have said, “and it will become fish.” The new sciences thus incite us to make the effort of admitting that the body they have undertaken to explore has proven itself unknown, though probably localizable and perceptible by its formulas.

As it happens, in the place where GL falls in the examination of Schema L (schema L3 bottom left), Model O shows, by means of the allegory of a vase, the real body (Model O bottom left), which the imaginary one, far from the contingencies of code, idealizes (Model O top right). Consequently, if psychoanalysis is exact on this point: GL, in its opposition to ideal literature, corresponds to the real body of the human being.

Obviously, we could initially reassure ourselves, saying this is just theory. And secondly we could say that it is because my argument develops itself in the context of health, which leads necessarily to a taking into account of the body which is the object of an institute of care. But we can also tell ourselves that it would be an elegant solution which would explain the resistance, otherwise enigmatic to GL. Because finally we come – if it does not concern only care – to ask ourselves if GL does not constitute the political body of the human being – understanding why politics – one sees this in the treatment of the masses in history – makes so little of the human being’s biological body.

Perhaps we should not fear to go that far, we who are devoted to the identification of GL. Because even if we pretend to put it in relief within Enterprise and the world of Commerce, we will not forget that in its claim to sustain the political body, GL finds itself at the source of the Code – and thus in this corner, “bottom left”, in a position of Truth to ethically direct the commerce and enterprise of a politics of an ecological body. It was important to me to evoke with you these very ambitious, but also very dynamic, perspectives for GL, although it is possible that at this point, the artificial intelligence alone will serve to further my purpose tomorrow.

ADDENDA    The diagonal, at the extremes of which one may situate the two states of literature (grey and Ideal), finds a substantiation in history, at the moment of the tradition which one calls hermetic – which took a quasi-scientific interest in signification. At the time it was theorized according to three stages - the significand, the cachant (hiding) and the signified. The “cachant" corresponds to the function of the hieroglyph – at the same time image & letter.     To the left the hermetic,traditional, formula and to the right, the cybernetic, current one; it is a fixed image here though its essence is in a dynamic rotation – to indicate only that, quadripartite, it orients the diagonals (for example the imaginary relation) which accommodate the old idea of the cachant   Below an animation, this time chronological, of the development of linguistic thought, shows how the cachant eclipses itself in the collapsus of the signification, to which a division succeeds, which redeploys the cachant, but under another and new form which one calls the Semblant (see meme). By proceeding to this point, and beyond, psychoanalysis thus arrives at an ecology – when it situates the cybernetic apparatus (artificial intelligence and/or virtual reality; in a word Lapareil - a ) in its formula of a collective psychology.