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Christopher Watkin | [email protected] |
christopherwatkin.com
Michel Serres Today
Abstract. This is an expanded version of a paper originally
given at the English and Theatre Studies research seminar at
Melbourne University in May 2015, and it retains its oral tone. My
intention both for the original paper and for this expanded version
is to provide a first introduction to the work and thought of
Michel Serres. I discuss how Serress work has been received in the
French-speaking and English-speaking worlds to date, briefly
highlight the different areas in which his thought is making a
decisive contribution today, and then offer reflections on what it
is that characterises his writing as a whole. I finish by examining
some of his recent thought in more detail, specifically his recent
elaboration of an econarratology around the idea of the "Great
Story" of the universe, opening the way, for the first time in
history, to develop a truly universal humanism.
Introduction
This is the start of a project. I am at the beginning of a
journey with Serres and in this talk I want to share with you some
of what drew me to write a book on him and where my research has
led me so far. The first half will be a general introduction to
Michel Serress thought, which means that it will inevitably be a
mile wide and an inch deep. In the second half I will focus on a
set of questions that arise in some of Serress recent work on
humanism. Think of it as a selection of jelly beans followed by a
steak. I will try to keep the technical philosophical work in the
paper to a minimum and show how Serres can be useful to scholars
across the disciplines.
Part A: An Introduction to Michel Serres
Biographical sketch
Michel Serres was born in 1930 in Agen, in the rural Aquitaine
region of south-west France. He entered the Ecole Normale
Suprieure, that great finishing school for French philosophers, in
the same year as Jacques Derrida, and the two corresponded during
their time at the ENS. In fact, they went on a skiing holiday
together in 1953, during which Derrida met his future wife
Marguerite. Derrida and Serres were two of only four students to
take philosophy that year, though Serress main subject was
mathematics. He spent 1956-8 in the French navy, during which time
he served in the operation to reopen the Suez canal and in the
Algerian war. From 1958-1968 he took up a lecturing post at the
university of Clermont-Ferrand, where he was a colleague of
Foucault at the time Foucault was working on The Order of Things.
During this period he also made a three-part television series with
Alain Badiou in 1967, entitled Model and Structure. In 1968 he
moved to the new experimental university in Vincennes where he was
succeeded in 1969 by Gilles Deleuze. He moved to a post at Paris I
(Panthon-Sorbonne) and in 1984 became professor in the Department
of French and Italian at Stanford University. In 1990 he was
elected as one of the forty members of the Acadmie Franaise, the
highest honour in French intellectual life. Serres has written over
seventy single-authored books, including two recent best sellers in
France: Petite Poucette (translated on Thumbelina) on our
technological culture, which sold over 100 000 copies in its first
year, and Temps des crises (Times of Crisis) on issues relating to
the financial crisis of 2008. He continues to publish today at the
rate of just over a book a year. For those interested in his
bibliography, there is a comprehensive list of publications on my
website, as well as a timeline of his life and publications.
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Reception of Serress work in France and the English-speaking
world
To say that Serres has written over seventy books, his reception
has been slight up to date. It is a corpus waiting to be discovered
and mined, especially in the English-speaking world. But if we dig
below the surface it turns out that the story of his reception is a
little more complicated than that. Curiously, his work is cited a
great deal without Serres himself being in the philosophical
limelight. Here, for example, is a graph, generated from the corpus
of google books, of the number of times Serres and Badiou are
mentioned in books in French, published from 1960 to 2008 (the data
stops in 2008):
And if we look at books published in English, we get this:
I make no claims for the statistical rigour of these graphs, and
the only points I want to make from them are that 1) since 1960
Serres has been, and continues to be, mentioned by name in more
French publications than his much better known contemporary Alain
Badiou, and 2) he has been much more adequately received in the
French speaking world than in the English (by a factor of roughly
10 to 1 as a percentage of all books published in the language a
particular year). Serres largely remains to be discovered by
English readers.
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If we add in some other contemporary French philosophers we get
the following trends for French-language books :
And these trends for English language publications:
What is striking in the French graph here is that, until around
2006-2007 Serres was far and away the most cited French philosopher
still living in 2015, at which point he was just pipped by Jacques
Rancire. Over a number of decades he has enjoyed a greater and more
sustained citation count than other living French philosophers in
Francophone publications, though again this is not yet reflected in
the English-speaking world.
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One final graph. If we look at Google Trends (i.e. what people
are searching for on the web) again we find an interesting
result:
Averaged over the period from 2005 to the present day, internet
activity for Michel Serres is higher than for other living French
philosophers; only Badiou comes close. However, despite these
consistently high ratings by comparison with other contemporary
French thinkers, there are only three existing monograph studies of
aspects of Serress work (either in English or in French), four
volumes of collected essays including one on Serres and Deleuze,
and a handful of special issues of journals and journal articles. I
think it is safe to say that, thus far, Serres has been somewhat
under-received. If he is cited and mentioned so much, why is he not
better known? William Paulson, who has written on Serres, offers
one possible explanation:
Serress writing may be called utopian in that it calls on an
audience that may not exist in any place, or that is so dispersed,
at any rate, as not to make up one of the identiable groupings we
call cultural communities.1
In other words, the range of subjects and disciplines within
which and about which he writes is so broad that all those with an
interest do not gather together as a group of Serresians. Whereas
Serres himself manages to cross disciplinary boundaries, the
community of his readers has not shown itself to be so courageous.
A related reason for Serress slight reception is that his thought
covers so great a breadth that it requires any reader to be ready
to leave their disciplinary comfort zone if they are to engage with
it.2 It is partly this cross-disciplinarity that draws me to
Serres, and I will talk more about it later.
1 William Paulson, Michel Serres's Utopia of Language,
Configurations 8:2 (2000) 217-8.
2 This point is made by Pierpaolo Antonello when he argues that
Any academic who engages herself with
Serress thought is then required to be a hybrid, to exceed the
boundary of any established profession or discipline, to become an
outsider. Pierpaolo Antonello, Celebrating a Master: Michel Serres,
Configurations 8:2 (2000) 167.
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How is Serres being used today?
The first thing to say here is that Serres is being used more
and more. The translation of his books is really taking off now,
with Bloomsbury in particular making more and more of his work
available in English. There are a number of reasons why Serress
work is being translated at an increasing pace now, and a number of
reasons for thinking that his time has now come. I will point to
four contemporary debates that are currently drawing heavily on
Serress writing. Posthumanism
A translation of Serress The Parasite was the inaugural volume
in the Minnesota University Press Posthumanities book series, which
billed it as The foundational work in the area now known as
posthuman thought. In The Parasite Serres argues that human
relations are not to be figured in the first instance in terms of
mutual exchange but of parasitism. Every relational structure,
whether human or non-human, Is parasitical. To suggest that the
human is parasitical upon the non-human world strikes a decisive
blow to the human non/human dichotomy, reframing the human not as
the master and possessor of nature, nor as the Cartesian or
phenomenological origin of the world, but as a second thought:
And that is the meaning of the prefix para- in the word
parasite: it is on the side, next to, shifted; it is not on the
thing, but on its relation. It has relations, as they say, and
makes a system of them. It is always mediate and never
immediate.3
Ecology and the environmental humanities
Serres is also at the forefront of the growing interest in
ecophilosophy or the environmental humanities, largely through his
1991 book The Natural Contract. In this important book he insists
that we cannot ignore that human interests and the interests of the
planet are more intricately intertwined than ever, and that we
cannot hope adequately to address the problems that face us today
if we consider them if we consider them first and foremost as human
issues. How can we hope to address climate change, for example, if
we remain within an anthropocentric frame? We must find a way of
taking all interestshuman and non-humaninto account, and Serress
natural contract is a proposal to achieve this aim. Just as the
social contract is an ideal framework for the regulation of human
society in which all its members agree to certain norms of respect
and behaviour, so the natural contract extends this regulatory
ideal to make it adequate to the problems and issues that face us
today, many of which surpass the merely human or cultural world. To
the objection that the worlds oceans or forests cannot meaningfully
enter into any agreement, Serres asks the objector to show him the
original signatures on the social contract. The nature of the
issues we face today means that we must give the non-human its
place at the table. New materialisms and object-oriented
thought
Serres is also foundational reference for the emerging trends of
new materialism and object oriented philosophy, partly in his own
name and partly through the formative influence he has had on the
thought of Bruno Latour.4 Serres insists on a break with the
linguistic philosophy of the late
3 Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr
(Minneapolis, MN: University Of Minnesota Press,
2007) 38-9. 4 See in particular Michel Serres and Bruno Latour.
Conversations on Culture, Science and Time, trans. Roxanne
Lapidus (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
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twentieth century, decrying any theory that is empty of objects
and deals only in words.5 A keen mountaineer and ex sailor, Michel
Serress own sensibility for the natural world runs through his
writing; his own philosophy has with the wind in its hair and soil
under its finger-nails. He has exerted a particular influence on
object-oriented thought through his refusal of the Cartesian
subject-object dichotomy and his account of what he calls the
quasi-object. One of Serress own examples of a quasi-object is the
ball in a soccer game. Neither simply natural nor entirely
cultural, the ball circulates among the players in a way that makes
possible a certain set of social relations. It is misses something
important, Serres argues, to characterise the ball as an inert
object at the whim of the human subjects in the situation; it
shapes and opens possibilities for their actions just as they do
for its actions. Other examples of quasi-objects would be the
smoking pipe passed from hand to hand and lip to lip, or the coin
or note that circulates to facilitate economic relations, or words
themselves, without the circulation of which human relations as we
know them would be unthinkable.6 Cross-disciplinarity
Finally in this brief survey of ways in which Serress thought is
being used today (though there are other areas of influence I have
no time to mention today), he is influential through the way his
work is genuinely cross-disciplinary and bridges the arts,
humanities, social sciences and hard sciences. Serres, as I said,
was trained as a mathematician and in one interview identifies his
discipline as history of science. Unlike some would-be
cross-disciplinary thinkers, he has earned his hard scientific
chops. But Serres offers us no quick and easy interdisciplinary
gesture or a casual nod in its direction. Throughout his career he
shows a deep commitment to genuinely cross-disciplinary study. One
image that Serres uses to describe the difficulty of
cross-disciplinary study comes from his own naval past and his
passion for navigation. It is the North-West passage, that complex
course from the Atlantic to the Pacific between Greenland and
Canada. It is a true connection, but it is not a linear or
straightforward one.
5 Michel Serres, Panoptic Theory, in Thomas M. Kavanagh (ed.),
The Limits of Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1989) 28-9. 6Michel Serres, Rameaux (Paris:
Editions le Pommier, 2004) 158.
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It is in terms of this local, painstaking navigation that Serres
works through what it means to engage in cross-disciplinary study.
Crossing the borders between academic disciplines cannot be simple,
off-the-shelf or linear. This only leads to selling out one
discipline to the assumptions or the methods of another, which is
what all too often passes for interdisciplinary study today. For
Serres, by contrast, cross-disciplinary work must be a careful,
labyrinthine and bespoke navigation of the local, complex and
unique relations between different fields:
The passage is rare and narrow [] From the sciences of man to
the exact sciences, or inversely, the path does not cross a
homogeneous and empty space. Usually the passage is closed, either
by land masses or by ice floes, or perhaps by the fact that one
becomes lost. And if the passage is open, it follows a path that is
difficult to gauge.7
And
Passages exist, I know, I have drawn some of them in certain
works using certain operators []. But I cannot generalize,
obstructions are manifest and counter-examples abound.8
One quick example of the sort of cross-disciplinary insights
Serres seeks to bring to bear in his writing is his discussions of
thermodynamics in the nineteenth century in the wake of Sadi
Carnots discovery of the principles that would later be formalised
as the second law of thermodynamics and entropy. Every metaphysics
needs its physics, Serres argues, and we can see the principles of
thermodynamics through the whole of nineteenth century culture:
Read Carnot starting on page one. Now read Marx, Freud, Zola,
Michelet, Nietzsche, Bergson, and so on. The reservoir is actually
spoken of everywhere, or if not the reservoir, its equivalent. But
it accompanies this equivalent with great regularity. The great
encyclopaedia and the library, the earth and primitive fecundity,
capital and accumulation, concentration in general, the sea, the
prebiotic Soup, the legacies of heredity, the relatively closed
topography in which instincts, the id, and the unconscious are
brought together. Each particular theoretical motor forms its
reservoir, names it, and fills it with what a motor needs. I had an
artefact, a constructed object: the motor. Carnot calls it the
universal motor. I could not find a word, here it is: reservoir. []
Question : in the last century, who did not reinvent the
reservoir?9
Serres sees a similar pattern in the twentieth century with
information theory and code: the unconscious is structured like a
language, the secret of life is found in the genetic code, and
structuralism and post-structuralism both employ an encode-decode
model of language, also taking on information theorys ideas of
noise, indeterminacy and interference.10 As Ren Girard says of
Serres, criticism is a generalized physics.11
7 Serres, Herms V, 18. Quoted on Harari and Bell, Journal
plusieurs voies xi.
8 Serres, Herms V, 23-4. Quoted on Harari and Bell, Journal
plusieurs voies xiii.
9 Michel Serres, La Distribution: Herms IV (Paris: Editions de
Minuit, 1977) 60-1. Quoted in English translation
at Josu v. Harari and David F. Bell, Journal plusieurs voies,
inMichel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy
(Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) xix.
10
Harari and Bell, Journal plusieurs voies xxiii. 11
Serres's major interest is the parallel development of
scientific, philosophical, and literary trends. In a very
simplified manner, one might say that Serres always runs counter to
the prevalent notion of the two cultures -scientific and
humanistic-between which no communication is possible. In Serres's
view 'criticism is a generalized physics,' and whether knowledge is
written in philosophical, literary, or scientific language it
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What are the general characteristics of Serress thought?
So those are some of the main ways in which Serres is being
deployed today in contemporary debates. My next question is: how
are we to characterise his thought? What is its overall shape; what
are its characteristic moves? It is a difficult question because 1)
he eschews the predictability of repeating the same moves and 2)
shape and space are themselves important themes in his thought.
Nevertheless, I think there is something useful that can be said in
this regard. 1) An encyclopedic method
Grant me for a moment that we might understand philosophy in
general, and the history of French philosophy in the last century
in particular, as a series of attempts to come to terms with the
relation between system and singularity.12 Let us think of these
attempts in terms of two broad tendencies, which I shall call
system philosophies and singularity philosophies. System
philosophies seek to bring apparently diverse phenomena, objects or
ideas under general explanatory concepts, finding the unity hidden
behind seeming multiplicity. Where seeming exceptions to such
systematisation exist they need to be explained away or
incorporated into the system. Examples of this tendency might be
Parmenides, the Scholastics, Descartes, Hegel and Sartre: fitting
all facts and all phenomena into a comprehensive and overarching
matrix and set of categories. The caricature of this philosophy is
that it is a top-down imposition: it flies at an altitude of 30 000
feet and shoe-horns individual facts and phenomena into a universal
matrix that emerges at such a level of abstraction. This sort of
thinking will often seek the universal or the general principle. It
is a philosophy of the same. On the other hand we have singularity
philosophies, which refuse systematisation and denounce
over-arching concepts, rejecting the idea that behind apparent
diversity lurks a more fundamental unity. These philosophies insist
upon singularity and uniqueness: at their most acute, they claim
that everything is always already an exception to every universal
rule or category to which we might wish to assign it, and to insist
on such rules is a violent imposition akin to racial stereotyping.
We might think perhaps of Heraclitus, Pascal, Kierkegaard or the
Nietzsche who said I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The
will to a system is a lack of integrity.13 This singularity
philosophy emphasises the individuality, the contrariness, the
unclassifiable recalcitrance of things. It is not a philosophy of
the same but a philosophy of difference, and its rallying cry could
be Derridas insistence that every other is altogether other.14 It
is interesting to note that these two extremes also account for the
factors that lead to philosophical celebrity, for each of them
embodies one of the traits that tend to draw a crowd of acolytes
round a particular philosopher and make a name for them. On the one
hand, system philosophers draw a following by offering a powerful
explanatory matrix able to account for what otherwise would be a
bewilderingly disparate and confusion melee of phenomena, events
and facts. Put somewhat crudely, you always have something clever
to say about the evening news because you can explain it and indeed
you can explain everything in terms of the system offered to you by
your favourite system philosopher or philosophers: well, of course,
whats really going on behind in
nevertheless articulates a common set of problems that
transcends academic disciplines and artificial boundaries. Harari
and Bell, Journal plusieurs voies xi. 12
Not the many and the one or the singular and the universal.
13
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the
Idols: And Other Writings, ed. by Aaron Ridley, Judith Norman
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 159. 14
This phrase recurs a number of times in Derridas writing. See
for example Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) 126.
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these events is such and such, but of course most people just
dont realise that. How nave! Good job we know better. On the other
hand, singularity philosophers build up an enthusiastic following
by out-critiquing those who went before them, by out-suspecting all
previous suspicion, exposing all previous critical philosophies as
incomplete or flawed and thereby proclaiming themselves more
sceptical than thou, until, inevitably, the philosophy in question
is in turn knifed in the back by its successor: The previous
generation thought they were being anti-metaphysical, but what they
failed to take into account of course was such and such, which made
them by all accounts the last metaphysicians. How nave! Good job we
know better. Where does Serres sit in relation to philosophies of
system and philosophies of singularity? In truth, he has no
interest either in elaborating the system which will yield the
truth of everything where before there has been only ideology and
confusion, nor in being more critical and sensitive to difference
than those who have gone before him. That is perhaps one reason why
there is no Serresian school in philosophy full of little
Serresians knowingly spouting the soundbites of their master. I
think it is a healthy feature of his reception, and long may it
continue. For his own part, Serres charts a middle course between
the Scylla of systematisation and the Charybdis of exceptionalism,
a course he sums up with the motif of the encyclopedia. First, an
encyclopedia ranges over the full extent of human and nonhuman
existence, taking in all disciplines. In the same way, Serress
thought has the ambition of stopping at every port, visiting every
city. In one interview he insists that A philosopher does
everything, otherwise he does nothing.15 Secondly, in ranging over
everything an encyclopedia does not pretend to exhaust anything, or
to give a complete account of any subject it treats. Thirdly, an
encyclopedia is not a system. It does not impose a matrix of
interpretation from above, but each article approaches its subject
in its own terms, often by different authors. It brings subjects
together not through top-down fiat but in a bottom-up way, drawing
local links and cross-references between ideas. It does not impose
categories from outside but traces isomorphisms and equivalences
from within.16 An encyclopedia is adequately characterised neither
as a system nor as a generalised exception to systematisation. In
Serress own words:
Philosophy has the job of federating, of bringing things
together. So analysis might be valuable, with its clarity, rigour,
precision and so on, but philosophy really has the opposite
function, a federating and synthesizing function. I think that the
foundation of philosophy is the encyclopaedic, and its goal is
synthesis.17
Or again, it is the philosophers job to attempt to see on a
large scale, to be in full possession of a multiple, and sometimes
connected intellection.18 In short, Serress encyclopedic approach
is a way of seeking connections not from the air but by sea. Or
again, Serres characterises his own work as an eighteenth century
salon, bringing the disciplines together in a conversation that
respects the
15
Michel Serres and Marie-Claude Martin, "Entretien: Un philosophe
fait tout, sinon il ne fait rien ." Le Temps, 9 April 2011.
http://www.letemps.ch/Page/Uuid/599bd724-6220-11e0-9818-ce393cc5d9d9/Michel_Serres_Un_philosophe_fait_tout_sinon_il_ne_fait_rien.
Last accessed April 2015. 16
This point is made on Harari and Bell, Journal plusieurs voies
xxxvi. 17
Michel Serres and Raoul Mortley. Chapter III. Michel Serres, In
French Philosophers in Conversation (ePublications@bond, 1991) 53.
http://epublications.bond.edu.au/french_philosophers/4/. Last
accessed May 2015. 18
Michel Serres, Herms V: le Passage du Nord-ouest (Paris :
Editions de Minuit, 1980) 24. Quoted on Harari and Bell, Journal
plusieurs voies 13.
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integrity of each, not like a modern university, dividing them
and often making them compete with each other.19 Or, in one final
image:
What I seek to form, to compose, to promote I cant quite find
the right word is a synthse, a confluence not a system, a mobile
confluence of fluxes. Turbulences, overlapping cyclones and
anticyclones, like on the weather map. Wisps of hay tied in knots.
An assembly of relations. Clouds of angels passing.20
2) The decline of the paradigm of consumption and the rise of
the paradigm of
communication
The second way in which I would like to characterise Serress
thought today is that he rejects the prevalent paradigm of
production and consumption in favour of the paradigm of
communication. We might think of this as the great wager of his
thought. Back in the 1950s he wagered that structuralism and all
the philosophy that would come in its wake went down a wrong track
when it reasoned in terms of a paradigm of production and
consumption inherited from Marx:
at the end of the war, Marxism held great sway in France, and in
Europe. And Marxism taught that the essential, the fundamental
infrastructure was the economy and production: I myself thought,
from 1955 or 1960 onwards, that production was not important in our
society, or that it was becoming much less so, but that what was
important was communication, and that we were reaching a culture,
or society, in which communication would hold precedence over
production.21
What does Serres mean when he says that production was becoming
less important? He is drawing attention to what he calls the
greatest revolution in human society since Neolithic times. Ever
since the beginning of the Neolithic around 10 000 BC when humanity
settled down and started planting crops, we have been in a culture
most of whose members are involved in the production and
consumption of primary goods, mainly foodstuffs. In Switzerland,
Germany, France and Italy in the year 1900, 70% of the population
worked the land. In the last century, however, that age-old pattern
has seen a dramatic change. Today, in the same countries, less than
1% of all workers are involved in agriculture. For Serres, that is
the greatest change that we have seen to human society in the last
ten millennia, greater than the Renaissance, and greater than the
two World Wars.22 Most of us today do not work in the production of
primary materials; we circulate information. Furthermore, this
circulation of information works according to a fundamentally
different paradigm from that of production and consumption. Think
of it this way (to use an illustration Serres sketches in one of
his radio broadcasts): If you grow and harvest wheat and bake
bread, and if I pay you five dollars for the loaf you have baked,
then you have five dollars and no loaf, and I have a loaf but have
lost five dollars. An exchange has taken place, on the basis of a
process of production, and you and I find ourselves in a
relationship of production, consumption and exchange. But that is
not how it works with information. When I give a lecture on a
French film or a French philosopher I do not have to forget that
information in order for my students to remember it. It is not an
exchange but a propagation. It is not a zero sum game. Of course it
may be couched within the framework of mechanisms of exchangethe
university takes money off the students and gives some of it to
me
19
Serres and Mortley, Chapter III. Michel Serres 59. 20
Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Culture,
Science and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press, 1995) 122. 21
Serres and Mortley, Chapter III. Michel Serres 51. 22
The figures are quoted in Serres and Martin, "Entretien: Un
philosophe fait tout, sinon il ne fait rien ".
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but that exchange is extrinsic to the propagation of information
in the lecture, it is not essential to the nature of communication
itself. In their essence, production/exchange and
communication/propagation function very differently. Back in the
1960s Serres wagered that our Western, industrialised society would
increasingly be characterised by the propagation of information,
not by the exchange of goods. Surely he was right: We have seen a
rapid decline in primary industry in the West, of which my own
childhood serves as a poignant example. When I was little, at the
end of the road where I grew up was the huge Manvers colliery and
coking plant. I have only vague memories of the winding towers and
chimneys now, but my parents tell me that on some days the wind
would blow the smoke and soot up the hill from the coking plant to
our house and washing hanging out on the line would gather little
black specks. Here is a picture of the Manvers complex from
1980:
The coking plant was closed in 1981, and the colliery in 1988.
What stands on the site now is, in part, a complex of call
centres:
The same story was repeated all over the coal mining areas of
the north of England. The Sheffield steel industry similarly shrank
to a small-scale high-end premium operation, while the same period
saw the dramatic rise of communication and data processing
technology from fixed to mobile phones and computers, for which the
paradigm of production is no longer adequate. It is a trend
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that the complex of technologies we call the internet has only
accelerated, and which is vividly exemplified in the loosing
battles currently being fought by corporations over DRM and the
free spread of information. The wager that Serres made in the 1950s
is currently being vindicated along the fibres of the internet. For
Serres, Marxism and the philosophies that rely on its insights
cannot account for this new reality of our society, because they
still assume a paradigm of production and exchange whereas in fact
more and more areas of society operate according to a paradigm of
communication. It is not that production, consumption and exchange
are going to die outof course notbut that they no longer adequately
describe how our society works. That brings to a close the jelly
bean part of this talk, seeking to range over Serress significance
and give a thumbnail sketch of some overall shapes of his thinking.
For the rest of my time I want to descend to ground level and look
more carefully at one aspect of his ecological thinking.
Part B: Serress Econarratology In a series of four recent books
on humanity and humanism,23 Serres makes a threefold claim:
now, for the first time in history, we can elaborate a truly
universal humanism
we can do this by telling the story of humanity as part of a
larger narrative of the universe
this larger narrative is told not by human beings about the
universe but told by the universe about itself
Lets begin with the first claim: a truly universal humanism. For
the first time in history, he argues, we now have the opportunity
to do justice to the universality of the term humanism because for
the first time in the millennial process of hominization we have
the scientific, technical and cognitive means [] to give it a
federating and non-exclusive content worthy of its name.24 What he
has in mind here is that palaeoanthropology has unearthed partial
skeletons, older than any recorded and culturally-specific history,
of our earliest human ancestors, the Lucys25 of the east African
savannah whose descendants would spread throughout the globe. These
discoveries give us a way to trace back the thread of time to a
moment before the birth of recorded history and before the
emergence of distinctive cultures within that history:
Our wisdom now places Lucy before Pliny the Elder, the bones
scattered in the valleys of Chad before Blind Homer and Noah the
vine-dresser, and our African Mother and Father before Adam and
Eve, before all ancestors venerated in all cultures; it reads the
genetic code before the code of Hammurabi. Here it is a question of
humanity, and not some evil off-white noise-box [bavard et mchant
blanchtre] despising the scarlet barbarian26
23
Michel Serres, Hominescence (Paris: Editions Le Pommier, 2001);
L'Incandescent (Paris: Editions le Pommier, 2003); Rameaux (Paris:
Editions le Pommier, 2004); Rcits d'humanisme (Paris: Editions le
Pommier, 2006). 24
Serres, Hominescence 171-2. All translations of French texts as
yet unpublished in English are the authors. 25
Lucy is the name given to the partial skeleton (about 40%
complete) of a 3.2 million year old australopithecus afarensis
discovered in Ethiopia by palaeontologist Donald C. Johanson in
1974. Until 2009, Lucy was the oldest substantial human ancestor
skeleton yet discovered. 26
Serres, L'Incandescent 196.
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13
This early record of humanity, he claims, is written in the
encyclopaedic language of all the sciences and [] can be translated
into each vernacular language, without partiality or imperialism.27
A truly universal humanism must begin with this pre-historic
moment. The second claim is that this story of humanity is part of
a larger narrative of the universe, which Serres calls the Great
Story (le Grand Rcit). The structure of this story is an extension
of Serress earlier work in biosemiotics. In The Birth of Physics he
argues, in information-theoretical terms, that meaning emerges as
an aleatory, local deviation in the window between two modes of
chaos: monotony and white noise.28 In the same way, in his later
work he understands narrative in terms of the interplay between two
elements: a relatively constant line (which in Rameaux he calls the
format) and unexpected deviations in that line which he pictures as
the kinks and twists of a branch. Like the information-carrying
signal that sits on the spectrum between the chaos of monotony and
the chaos of white noise, so also the growth of a story takes place
under a double tension: the necessity of using pre-established
forms in order to communicate in a way that can be understood, and
an obligation to rupture, deviate from and remake these forms
because simply repeating them would hold no message at all.29 It is
in the tension between format and variation that stories emerge,
tracing a continuity, branch-like, through haphazard, contingent
and chaotic points.30 Like a growing branch, a developing story
need have no final end point, predetermined or otherwise (we are a
long way with Serres from the Aristotelian mythos, and also from
any deconstructive weak messianism) , and though its eventual form
may seem to have a certain retrospectively apprehended teleological
balance, its growth is a series of contingencies. We must, Serres
insists, quell the prophetic instinct to project the end of the
story from its beginning as if a single intention held together its
disparate parts, and instead force ourselves to think a repetition
or rule without finality and without anthropomorphism.31 The Great
Story is told by Serres retrospectively as a series of four major
and contingent bifurcations in the branch that leads to human
beings, four events each more ancient than the last. The first
event already takes us back millions of years to the appearance on
the planet of homo sapiens. The second event is the emergence of
life on earth, from the first RNA with the capability to duplicate
itself, through the three billion years when bacteria were the
dominant life-form, to the explosion of multi-cellular organisms
recorded in the Burgess shale and the huge proliferation of orders,
families, genera and species. The third takes us back from biology
to astrophysics and to the first formation of material bodies in an
infant universe. When it reaches a certain temperature the
ionisation that prevented certain particles forming nuclei ceases,
and matter begins to become concentrated into galaxies separated by
a quasi-void.32 Finally, the fourth and most distant event is the
birth of the universe itself, the origin of origins. Properly
speaking, these different stages in the story do not form a
succession, as if each needed to stop for the next to begin. The
universe is still cooling; the earth is still developing and new
planets forming; life on earth, and quite possibly elsewhere, is
still diversifying and proliferating, and human beings are still
evolving. It is better not to think of a succession of chapters
(and this is where Serres image of the branch is potentially
misleading) but one story told by four voices in counterpoint, each
successively joining the collective narrative at a specific moment.
What unites these four voices for Serres is the idea of nature,
understood etymologically as that which is born, that which marks
a
27
Serres, LIncandescent 32. 28
Michel Serres, La Naissance de la physique dans le texte de
Lucrce: fleuves et turbulences (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977)
181/The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes (Manchester: Clinamen
Press, 2000) 146. 29
Serres, Rcits dhumanisme 154. 30
Serres, Rcits dhumanisme 153. 31
Serres, Rcits dhumanisme 188. 32
Serres, Rameaux 115.
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14
temporal distinction, a before and an after. Nature is a story
of new-born events, contingent and unpredictable.33 In passing, I
want to draw two important consequences from Serress account of
humanity as part of the Great Story. First, in Serress account
humanity derives its identity from its place in the universal
narrative, not from any biological or psychological capacity that
may or may not mark the difference between the human and the
non-human, such as intelligence, rationality, language use or
bipedalism. This allows Serres account refreshingly to avoid the
interminable and often dangerous debates around what faculty or
capacity might or might not make human beings unique, along with
the liminal cases thrown up by such an approach: the senile, the
neonate, and those with severe mental or physical disabilities.
Whereas such an account of humanity based on supposedly distinctive
human capacities advances by drawing more or less unsubstantiated
divisions and erecting castles of hierarchy on the shifting sands
of our current biological and psychological understanding, Serres
narrative approach identifies the human by drawing it ever further
into a story it shares with the rest of the universe, not in the
first instance by arguing for its uniqueness. The second
consequence I want to draw here from Serress understanding humanity
in terms of the Great Story is that it gives us a new understanding
of culture. In an interview with Pierre Lna in the Cahier de lHerne
dedicated to his work, Serres draws two immediate consequences from
understanding humanity in terms of the Great Story. First, it gives
us a new sense of culture. Traditionally, a person would be thought
cultured if they had some working knowledge of four thousand years
of history, beginning either in Greece or Mesopotamia; when someone
discovers fifteen billion years behind him he must change his
thinking completely or, to translate Serres literally, he no longer
has the same head.34 This idea that humanity, when considered as
part of the Great Story, no longer has the same head is true
literally as well as figuratively. Serres repeats often that
different areas of the human brain evolved at different times: the
neo-mammalian neocortex, the paleo-mammalian limbic system and the
reptilian basal ganglia.35 This brings along with it a shift in the
notion of narrative itself. What used to be the beginning of
history (usually thought to be coeval with the invention of written
communication some four thousand years ago) is now shown to be the
briefest of episodes arriving at the end of a much more ample
narrative which, Serres claims, is recounted by the universe
itself. This brings us to the third of Serress three claims: the
universe is not ventriloquized by humanity but it tells its own
story. There is for Serres no imperialist, anthropocentric or
animist imposition of human meaning-making and story-telling on the
recalcitrant, indifferent or meaningless flux of life, no torturing
of a helpless nature on the rack of merciless syntax. The universe,
the earth and life know quite well how to tell the story of their
own origin and evolution, and when I write I share in and draw upon
the same resources.36 We see here a marked difference from Badiou,
Meillassoux and Malabou, all of whom (Meillassoux and Malabou
explicitly) hold that the universe is indifferent to human concerns
and that to ascribe to it human categories of meaning is an
anthropocentric error. Serress position here in fact cuts against
the grain of the great majority of the linguistic philosophy that
held sway in the generation previous to Meillassoux, Badiou and
Malabou, and against the grain of most modern thinking since
Descartes. For Serres there is no substance dualism, no Camusian
absurd, no Kantian noumenon, and as far as Serres is concerned it
is no more
33
Serres, Rameaux 115-6. 34
Michel Serres and Pierre Lna, Sciences et philosophie
(entretien), In Franois L'Yvonnet and Christiane Frmont (eds.),
Cahier de l'Herne Michel Serres, (Paris: ditions de lHerne, 2010)
55. 35
See Pascal Picq, Michel Serres and Jean-Didier Vincent,
Qu'est-ce que l'homme? (Paris: Les Editions du Pommier, 1999) 90;
Peter Hallward and Michel Serres, The Science of Relations: An
Interview, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 8:2
(2003): 233; Serres, LIncandescent 23. 36
Serres, Rcits dhumanisme 80.
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15
anthropocentric to claim that the universe is meaningful than it
is to claim that Romeo and Juliet is meaningful: they both
participate in the same universal dynamic of growth and deviation.
For Serres there is no such thing as brute, indifferent matter. The
world tells its own story and all we need do is find the ears to
hear it. As Steven Connor puts it, coding, information, writing,
goes all the way down, and all the way back.37 It could be objected
that claiming the world tells its own story is more cosmetic than
substantial, because however far the Story may stretch back in time
it still needs to be told through human investigation and in human
language, and is still therefore a story told by humans and for
humans which happens to ventriloquize the non-human. However, this
objection assumes that human language emerges ex nihilo in the
Great Story, which is precisely what Serres contests. In the same
way that, in The Birth of Physics, Genesis and The Parasite he
insists that semiotics are natural, so also in his elaboration of
the Great Story he argues that narrative is an inherent feature of
the natural universe, of the universe of natal events. There is no
qualitative difference between the story of evolution and the story
of the Odyssey: they both enact, each in their own mode, the
processing, ordering and communication of information in an
interplay between format and deviation.38 Serres had previously
made the argument that all life (and beyond: Serres includes
crystals) receives, processes, stores and emits information:
nothing distinguishes me ontologically from a crystal, a plant, an
animal, or the order of the world.39 In the four books exploring
the humanism of the Great Story he merely expands this biosemiotic
analysis to encompass his new econarratology, describing this
expansion with an image from aeronautics:
A four-stage rocket launches the birth of language, the
emergence of the ego and the dawn of narrative which, in telling
their story, forms and creates them but forgets their origin: first
it bursts forth from heat towards white noise; from this brouhaha
to the first signals; then from these to feeble melodies; finally
from these to the first vowels Noise, call, song, music voice come
before the basic form of enunciation, before the language of
story.40
The world does not mutely wait for the advent of humanity in
order to tell its story; things speak for themselves, write by
themselves and write about themselves, performatively speaking
their autobiography, or autoecography: The universe, the Earth and
life know how to tell the story of their origin, of their
evolution, the contingent bifurcations of their development and
sometimes let us glimpse the time of their disappearance. An
immense story emanates from the world.41 We get close to the heart
of the matter, I believe, if realise that Serress metaphors are in
fact synecdoches: he is not speaking of one thing in terms of a
second, ostensibly unrelated thing but speaking of a whole in terms
of one of its parts. One of Serres characteristic moves, and we see
it here in his defence of metaphorical language, is to invert the
order of our thinking so that elements we previously considered to
be in a horizontal, metaphorical relation are in fact seen to be
nested in a synecdoche. In the example we are presently
considering, if we object that the rhythms of nature cannot
properly be classed as a story in anything other than an
anthropomorphising metaphor, Serres might reply that, rather than
trying and failing to force the rhythms and events of the world
37
Steven Connor, Michel Serres: The Hard and the Soft, A Paper
Given at The Centre for Modern Studies, University of York 26
November 2009, 22. http://stevenconnor.com/hardsoft/hardsoft.pdf.
38
Serres, Rameaux 178. 39
Michel Serres, La Distribution: Herms IV (Paris: Editions de
Minuit, 1977) 271/Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy 83.
40
Serres, Rcits dhumanisme 49-50. 41
Serres, Rcits dhumanisme 80.
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16
into a mode of storytelling modelled on human syntactic prose
(which would merely constrain them to become an ungainly extension
of Aristotelian narrative) we should rather realise that the
varieties of human storytelling are themselves already one local
expression of a broader phenomenon which they neither exhaust nor
inaugurate:
Must I find stories or confessions in the inertia of the living?
When I write my own stories and confessions, do I realise that, as
a fractal fragment of the universe, I am imitating galaxies, the
planet, masses of molecules, radioactive particles, the bellowing
of a dear or the vain unfurling of a peacocks plumage?42
In other words, the idea that nature tells its own story is not
an unwarranted metaphor; on the contrary, storytelling understood
as a human cultural practice is already a synecdochic expression of
a much more widespread natural phenomenon. When I write, I write
like the light, like a crystal or like a stream; I tell my story
like the world. A frequently cited phrase from Serres The Birth of
Physics has until now always been translated as History is a
physics and not the other way round. Language is first in the
body.43 However, this translation collapses the multivalence of the
French histoire, and the sentence could equally run Story is a
physics. In fact, both senses of histoire are at play in Serres
discussion of negentropy in The Birth of Physics. The change of
paradigm from the metaphorical to the synecdochic is also a
challenge to anthropocentrism. To see eco-narratives as a
metaphorical extension of human storytelling is to assume that
human storytelling as the non-metaphorical yardstick by which all
other putative narratives must be measured. But to see human
storytelling as a synecdoche of a much broader phenomenon is, as
Serres remarks, to decentre narrative with relation to the human at
the moment when nature wrests from us our claim to an exclusivity
of language use.44 In conclusion, Serres econarratology allows us
to think the universe not simply as a blank canvas for the
quintessentially human practice of storytelling, but as the
narrator of its own story. This means that, just as narrative
identity allows us to think human identity beyond the possession of
determinate capacities (like language or rationality) and beyond
the limit of the human and the non-human, so also Serress
ecological narrative identity frees us from having (falsely) to
identify the universe as an inert and passive collection objects
inviting human manipulation and exploitation, and a blank canvas
waiting to be daubed with our ex nihilo human meanings. This
paradigm shift has the power to enrich the dialogue between the
arts and the sciences at a moment when the global issues that face
us are increasingly irreducible to the human scale, and to expand
the study of narrative identity beyond its customary
anthropocentric limits. In his insistence upon the Great Story of
the universe, I would argue that Serres has indeed presented the
study of humanity across the human and natural sciences with a
valuable tool and a productive way of thinking.
42
Serres, Rcits dhumanisme 80. 43
Serres, La Naissance de la physique 186/The Birth of Physics
150. 44
Serres, Rcits dhumanisme 80.