“Suzanne Briet (‘Madame Documentation’) was an important French Documentalist just before and following the Second World War. Though others preceded her, Briet was unique in so strongly attributing to documentation and to documentary signs a cultural origin and function. In this she followed the founder of European Documentation, Paul Otlet, but she differed from Otlet in that she understood ‘science’, ‘culture’, and thus documentation more in the context of military-industrial post-war capitalist economies and in terms of the global ‘development’ of the time than in terms of the harmonious world of global ‘knowledge’ that Otlet had envisioned. In this way, Briet stands between Otlet’s information utopia (reminiscent of the world industrial exhibitions of the 19th and early 20th centuries) and information theory and cybernetics in the United States which saw human culture and language as troublesome mediums for successful communication and information transmission.” (Translated by
Ron Day and Laurent Martinet)
