In 2024, Elon Musk came to Notre Dame. He even tweeted in Latin the first words of the Magnificat, the Virgin Mary's song to his cousin Elizabeth. Comical and cosmic moment where, for two hours, the main coordinates of our civilization rolled up on themselves. To understand this pile-up of symbols, it is undoubtedly necessary to re-read Régis Debray (The Diagonals of the Mediologist, 2001). Elon Musk at Notre-Dame is the space compression machine that telescopes the time machine.
According to the philosopher and father of mediology, any civilization must solve two problems: connect the points of space and link the moments of time, communicate and transmit; what Elon Musk and Notre Dame are doing respectively. Our means of communication allow us to go here then elsewhere and even to be here and elsewhere. Cars, planes, rockets, media, digital servers and satellites circulate at varying speeds of individuals, images, information, passions, problems, viruses… But “it is not because we network the world that we will be able to inhabit this network as a world”warns Régis Debray.
Connect everything
We must still be careful not to lose the thread of generations and connect the present to the past, the women and men of today to those of yesterday. It's called to transmitthat's to say “transport information over time”. Reason for the existence of States, schools, churches, academies, corporations and all institutions, which are immense machines for sedimenting and continuing the human experience.
The fabric of the world is made of these two threads that are irreducible to each other: communication and transmission, space and time. Elon Musk, like a good engineer, works to densify the former, folding space ever more in on itself. Each of its companies (SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink, Neuralink, X, Hyperloop, etc.) confirms this same stubbornness to connect everything. Did he not imagine connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than thirty minutes thanks to a supersonic TGV traveling in a vacuum tunnel? Notre-Dame, for its part, continues “the legend of the centuries” as President Emmanuel Macron recalled, not without lyricism. By rebuilding it, we have humbly taken our place in the long chain of builders and reconnected with ancestral know-how.
Communication and transmission in harmony
If Elon Musk came to Notre-Dame, it is because ceci (communication) did not kill that (transmission). Victor Hugo feared that the book would replace the stone. Régis Debray fears that our devices for domesticating space will swallow up and supplant our devices for taming time. It must be said that the first are fascinating and docile: we house the world in the palm of our hand and we navigate with fluidity and freedom (at least in appearance). The latter are annoying and coercive. The law, the rule, the lesson, the mass… You have to force yourself and obey. Also, what we gain in mobility we risk losing in continuity.
However, to restore Notre-Dame, images, capital and materials had to circulate; and quickly. The whole world rushed to the bedside of old Europe. Proof that the two opposing forces of communication and transmission can still add up without canceling each other out. But precisely, we would like to know the exact formula for this balance in order to replicate it in all segments of our experience. Particularly in our relationship with nature, this “temple where living pillars sometimes let out confused words…”. Because if this cathedral burns, is it not precisely because our passion to communicate and circulate outweighs our duty to transmit?
