Petite Poucette Quotes

“Faced with these mutations, we no doubt need to be invent-ing unimaginable novelties, far outside the obsolete frameworks that still format our behaviors, our medias, and our projects—all of which are being drowned in the society of the spectacle.”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials

“Gradually, however , knowledge became objectivized, first in scrolls or on pieces of vellum or parchment, which were the supports of writing; then, during the Renaissance, in books made out of paper, which found their support in the printing press; and finally, today, on the web, which is the support of email messages and information”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials

“We adults have transformed our society of the spectacle into a pedagogical society whose overwhelming competition, willfully ignorant, has eclipsed the school and the university. The media long ago took over the function of teaching— the time when one hears and sees, the time of seduction and consequence.”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials

“When the old Ptolemaic model had accumulated so many epicycles that the movement of the stars became complicated and unreadable, a change became necessary. The center of the system was moved toward the sun, and everything became clear again. The written code of Hammurabi no doubt put an end to the socio-juridical difficulties that had arisen in oral law. Our own complexities come from a crisis of writing.”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials

“With their cell phone, they have access to all people; with GPS, to all places; with the Internet, to all knowledge. They inhabit a topological space of neighborhoods, whereas we lived in a metric space, coordinated by distances.”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials

“A code resembled a coin with two sides, heads and tails, which were contradictory: both accessible and secret.”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials

“The new victory of these old procedures stems from the fact that the algorithmic and the procedural both rely on codes.”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials

“Algorithmic thought arose before the invention of geometry in Greece, and reemerged in Europe with Pascal and Leibniz, who invented two calculating machines and, like Thumbelina, used pseudonyms.”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials

“The result may be a realignment of our socio-political landscape by the advent of a fifth power—the power of data—which is independent of the four other powers: legislative, executive, and judicial powers, and the media.”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials

“The space of circulation, a diffuse orality, free movements, the end of classified classes, disparate distributions, the serendipity of invention, the speed of light, the novelty of both subjects and objects, the search for a new reason. . . . The diffusion of knowledge can no longer take place on any campus in the world, which are themselves ordered and formatted by the page, rational in the old manner, imitating the camps of the Roman army. This is the space of thought where Thumbelina, in both her body and her soul, spent her youth.”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials

“Every abstract idea brings with it an immense economy of thought.”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials

“We need order, certainly, but an order without reason. It is reason that must be changed. The only authentic intellectual act is invention. Our preference should be for the labyrinth of electronic chips.”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials

“Order, though practical and effi-cient, can imprison. Although it promotes movement, in the end it can also freeze movement. The check-list, though es-sential for action, can sterilize discovery. An atmosphere penetrated with disorder, by contrast, is like an apparatus that has a certain play in it, and it is precisely this play that provokes invention.”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials

“A democracy of knowledge has never existed , not because those who had knowledge possessed power, but because knowledge itself required humiliated bodies, including the bodies of those who possessed knowledge.”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials

“It is the end of the era of knowledge.”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials

“Thumbelina, along with her brothers and sisters, is now producing, like a choir, a background noise that drowns out the voice of writing.”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials

“Cogito: my thinking is distinguished from knowledge, and from the various processes of understanding— memory, imagination, deductive reason, discernment, geometry— that have been externalized, along with synapses and neurons, in the computer.”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials

“Why have these innovations not taken place? I hesitate to accuse philosophers (I consider myself to be one of them), although their vocation is to anticipate the knowledges and practices to come, and it seems to me that they have failed in this task. Preoccupied with day-to-day politics, they have not perceived the arrival of the contemporary.”
― Michel Serres, Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials