Whatever: a novel Read Online Free PDF

subsequently learn, was functional in the extreme. He was living in a studio flat in the 15th arrondissement. The heating was included in the rent. He barely did more than sleep there, since he was in fact working a lot - and often, outside of working time, he was reading Micro-Systemes. The famous degrees of freedom consisted, as far as he was concerned , in choosing his dinner by Minitel (he was a subscriber to this service, new at the time, which guaranteed the delivery of hot food at a given hour and with relatively little delay).

    I liked to think of him of an evening composing his menu, using the Minitel which sat on the left corner of his desk. I used to tease him about the telephone hotlines; but in reality I'm sure he was a virgin.

    He was happy in a sense. He took himself to be, and rightly so, a participant in the telecommunications revolution. He actually did live each increase in computer power, each step towards the globalization of the network, as a personal victory. He voted socialist. And, funnily enough, he adored Gauguin.

    11

    I was never to see Jean-Yves Fréhaut again. And anyway, why would I have?
    Basically we'd never really clicked . In any event people rarely see each other again these days, even in cases where the relationship begins in an atmosphere of enthusiasm. Sometimes breathless conversations take place, touching on the general aspects of life; sometimes, too, a carnal embrace comes about. Sure, you exchange telephone numbers but, generally speaking, you rarely call again. And even when you do call and meet up, disillusionment and disenchantment rapidly take over from the initial enthusiasm. Believe me, I know life; it's all perfectly cut and dried.

    This progressive effacement of human relationships is not without certain problems for the novel. How, in point of fact, would one handle the narration of those unbridled passions, stretching over many years, and at times making their effect felt on several generations? We're a long way from Wuthering Heights, to say the least. The novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference or nothingness; a flatter, more terse and dreary discourse would need to be invented.

    If human relations become progressively impossible this is due, precisely, to the multiplying of those degrees of freedom of which Jean-Yves Fréhaut declared himself the enthusiastic prophet. He himself had never known any intimate relationship , of that I'm sure; his state of freedom was extreme. There is no acrimony in what I say. Here was, as I've mentioned, a happy man; that said, I don't envy him his happiness.

    The species of information technology thinker to which Jean-Yves Fréhaut belonged is less rare than you'd think. In every average-sized company you can find one, occasionally two. Besides, most people vaguely admit that every relationship, in particular every human relationship, is reduced to an exchange of information (if of course you include in the notion of information messages of a non-neutral, that is, gratifying or punitive, nature). Under these conditions it doesn't take long for a thinker on information technology to be transformed into a thinker on social evolution. His discourse will often be brilliant, and hence convincing; the affective dimension may even be built into it.

    The next day - again on the occasion of a farewell drink, but this time at the Ministry of Agriculture - I had occasion to discuss things with the theoretician, flanked as usual by Catherine Lechardoy. He himself had never met Jean-Yves Fréhaut, and would have no occasion to do so. I imagine that in a hypothetical meeting the intellectual exchange would have been courteous, yet of a high level. Doubtless they'd have arrived at a consensus on certain values such as freedom, transparency and the necessity of establishing a system of generalized transactions subsuming the totality of social activities.

    The object of this moment of conviviality was to fête the retirement of a