Abstract

Mapping the power relations that constitute world capitalism, while lending a figurative twist to precise information : these ambitions are shared by the work of Oyvind Fahlströme, in the 60s-70s, and Bureau d’Études today. In both cases the aim is to support oppositional movements. But the project of a popular university or an alternative parliament that was implicit in Fahlströme’s approach did not come to fruition. Deconstructing the current symbolic order and resymbolizing it differently requires the invention of new, pragmatically effective social networks. On the horizon of their mapping work, Bureau d’Études sees not only an active and transformative critique of « world government » but also the constitution of a productive and cooperative « republic of individuals, » self-organizing on a planetary scale, in exodus from any state sovereignty