Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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L'homme qui voulait classer le monde. Paul Otlet et le Mundaneum. |
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Author: Jan Baetens Françoise Levie, L'homme qui voulait classer le monde. Paul Otlet et le Mundaneum. |
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If asked for a timeline for the emergence of the Internet, many people will spontaneously produce the name of Vannavar Bush, father of the "memex" and first steppingstone of a long chain of dreamers, thinkers, inventors, technicians, funding masters and administrators who made possible the actual structure of the World Wide Web. Yet like all histories, that of the Internet has its own blind spots. One of the most intriguing of these lacunas is without doubt the strange and fascinating figure of Paul Otlet (1868-1944), a Belgian researcher and political activist -it is not easy to pigeonhole his innumerable activities into one specific category- whose name continues to be well known in the specialized field of information and documentation studies (a term coined by Otlet himself, by the way), but has fallen into complete oblivion outside these circles.
Some three decades after the first biography by William Boyd Rayward, Françoise Levie, an independent Belgian scholar, offers a new and refreshing study which for the first time brings in the material stored in Paul Otlet's personal archives or museum, the so-called "Mundaneum" (in the case of Otlet, words like "personal" have to be taken cum grano salis , that thin was the line between the individual and the political, the intimate and the collective throughout his life). Levie's work, a traditional biography in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, is thoroughly researched and closely follows the historical thread of Otlet's life. It presents mainly three major approaches, seamlessly knit in a clear and well written study of more than 350 cleverly illustrated pages.
First of all, Levie gives a detailed account of Otlet's life. It is a life that starts as a fairy tale, with a boy growing up in a bourgeois family, who provide him with all the opportunities he needs in order to develop his own interests as freely as possible. However, very soon, after his father's bankruptcy and the tragedy of the first World War, that life becomes the moving and often incredible story of a man who despite all the difficulties he encounters, never stops believing in his dreams and eventually gets so obsessed with them that he is completely cut off from life itself. What Otlet wants can be summarized in the following way: universal fraternity and understanding through the construction of a world archive - both a documentation centre where all human texts and images are to be gathered and a kind of civil and architectural utopia, an extraterritorial zone where representatives of all countries, cultures, and languages, will live and work in peace and harmony. The tension between Otlet's dreams, which were taken very seriously in the first half of his adult life, and their gradual collapse during his last decades, is the basis of Levie's sympathetic although not uncritical account. Levie does not underestimate, for instance, the intellectual flaws in The second dimension of the book is a very illuminating analysis of the cultural context that explains the existence and the work of a man like Paul Otlet. In a sense, Otlet represents the convergence of two paramount forces of Western modernity: on the one hand, the explosion of knowledge and the desire to manage this immeasurable amount of new facts and ideas, and on the other hand, the rise of transnational structures and the craving for a new world order that would save mankind from the horrors of nationalism and imperialism. The creation of the "Society of Nations" as well as the emerging science of information studies constitute the double background of Paul Otlet's many attempts to foster the mutual reinforcement of science and fraternity. Levie shows very astutely how a figure like Otlet is also indebted to his own country (and vice versa). It is in "little Belgium" that the need to go beyond the actual restrictions of life is felt much more sharply than in larger countries, and it is also in countries like Belgium that there is often quite some goodwill to leap into universalistic utopias. Yet it is also in Belgium that dreamers and inventors are facing difficulties typical of all small countries: funding is always a problem, and therefore in order to realize something they are often dependent on foreign support, which of course follows its own rules. In this regard, it is important to stress the highly illuminating chapters on Otlet's contacts and, notably, his friendship with Le Corbusier. The relationship between Otlet and Le Corbusier illustrates not just Otlet's exceptional capacity of networking, but also his systematic crossing of disciplinary boundaries: information studies, politics, architecture, aesthetics, philosophy - all these fields merged in Otlet's work. The most original part of the book, however, has to do with Paul Otlet's contribution to information studies, and his role in the gradual invention of what would become the World Wide Web. Trained as a law student, Otlet turned very rapidly to the practice and theory of bibliography, of which he had been a great innovator until almost the end of his life. In his very typical way, Otlet never made distinctions between the extremely big and the extremely small, proposing for instance both a new version of Dewey's UDC system and a normalization of the filing card (he also had strong ideas on the daily amount of cards to be written by his female employees, but that is another story). Levie is absolutely right in stressing the major importance of Otlet's Traité de documentation , a visionary treatise published in 1934. Many of the ideas of this book have become the standards of contemporary information science, and the eagerness to open the field to the new media of the ear (?) is absolutely breathtaking. Otlet introduces the microfilm, brings together print culture and visual culture, and tears down the walls of the library by proposing a system of reading at large distance through techniques of photographic broadcasting. More than a decade before Bush, Otlet was about to make the step from the world of the book to the world of communication and information. The reasons that explain Otlet's failure are manifold: lack of funding, lack of political backing, lack of personal networks. Since the mid-twenties, Otlet had been losing everything he could rely upon.
Today, it is easy, of course, to foreground the limits of Otlet's work. Elements such as the ideal of broadcasting, the idea of the library as a building, and the idea of disciplinary boundaries have all been challenged by recent practice and theories of interdisciplinary, dematerialized storage, and Web 2.0 interactivity. Yet, these limitations -which are unavoidable in any person's thinking- should not prevent from rediscovering and appreciating the truly revolutionary force of Otlet's practice as well as of many of his speculations. At the same time, the harshness of his life, which has not been a long path to glory, should remain a source of inspiration and strength to all those who try to invent and proceed in often terribly frustrating conditions. |
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Jan Baetens is teaching at the Institute for Cultural Studies of the KU Leuven and is founding editor of Image [&] Narrative Jan Baetens enseigne à l'Institut d'Etudes Culturelles de la KU Leuven et codirige "Image [&] Narrative". |
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