"The book of differences": Michel Serres In Memoriam (9/1/1930-6/1/2019)

The book of differences, noise, and disorder would only be the book of evil for someone who would prohibit the Author of the universe, through calculation, from a world that is uncorruptibly dependable.  This, however, is not the case.  The difference is part of the thing itself, and perhaps it even produces the thing.  Maybe the radical origin of things is really that difference, even though classical rationalism damned it to hell.  In the beginning was the noise.

—Michel Serres, The Parasite

            Michel Serres came to prominence during the rise of what we know today as “science studies”: the humanistic discourses that took science as an object of sociological analysis.  For science studies, this object is no longer a supreme purveyor of knowledge, objectively distant and unbiased.  Rather, science studies positions science as a body of knowledge like any other—political, economic, philosophical, etc.—subject to the prejudice of experimenters and the limits of instrumentation.  Yet Serres’s work is far from the sociological examinations of his contemporaries, best exemplified in the rigorous observations of Bruno Latour.  Serres pursued something more akin to a poetic investigation of the shared intricacies of literature and science—how literature and science cycled through each other in a series of historical feedback loops—and he was interested in how the seasons of historical change impacted the way Western culture perceived its sciences, often unconsciously.

            “[…] since Rousseau,” Serres writes, “one no longer hesitates to invoke science in the realm of law, power, and politics.  It is because science has already pointed the way to a winning strategy.”  Serres was keen on science’s drive to dominate nature, inherent in the Cartesian rational will; but this dominating drive didn’t define science so much as characterize the emergence of its modern politico-economic form.  Science is never a stable host of ideas or principles, a set of axioms from which its practitioners venture forth to know the world.  It is a series of evolving systems, conditioned by the societies in which they appear.  “We are in the presence of three types of systems: the first, logico-mathematical, is independent of time; the second, mechanical, is linked to reversible time; the third, thermodynamic, is linked to irreversible time.”  The logico-mathematical system is the one handed down to modern philosophers by the ancient Greeks; the mechanical is the one devised primarily by Newton and Leibniz; the thermodynamic one is that devised primarily by Maxwell.  Different historical periods, different conditions of knowledge and perception.  It is only with the third—the thermodynamic system—that we arrive at the possibility for science studies, for the study of science’s inscriptive practices (pardon the long quote):

At the beginning of the twentieth century, communication theory introduced a series of concepts such as information, noise, and redundancy, for which a link to thermodynamics was rather quickly demonstrated. It was shown, for example, that information (emitted, transmitted, or received) was a form of negentropy. […] information theory was considered the daughter of thermodynamics; theorizing immediately began about activities as ordinary as reading, writing, the transmission and storing of signals, the optimal technique for avoiding obstacles along their path, and so forth. Of course, the theoreticians of information theory accomplished this with means inherited directly from the physics of energies belonging to the macroscopic scale. Success confirmed their enterprise. Hence, in a parallel manner, the great stability of traditional philosophical categories but their massive application [now appears] in a different area: discourse, writing, language, societal and psychic phenomena, all acts which one can describe as communication acts. […] The system under consideration becomes a system of signs.

With Serres, we find a lucid and compelling explanation for why literary humanism (in which I include not just literary studies, but philosophy, sociology, and history) finds such power in scientific knowledge.  The signifying practices of science—its means of expression—suddenly become objects of scientific inquiry: the study of communication and information.

            This isn’t to say that humanists miraculously gained a foothold on scientific theories of information that scientists didn’t have, or that they even understood the theories themselves.  One doesn’t enjoy an expert’s grasp of Claude Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” without an expert’s training in mathematics and thermodynamics.  Serres’s comment doesn’t bestow wisdom on humanists who haven’t done the work.  It does, however, explain the attraction for humanists interested in scientific practice and history.  For Serres, this is no small convergence.  It’s an embodiment of the engine that drives intellectual pursuit, the feedback between the unthinking matter of the universe and the thoughtful agent who conceptualizes it—or as Serres says, “the living organism.”

            Serres’s was always a philosophy of humility and dismantling.  He didn’t try to decontaminate what couldn’t be decontaminated: “This is the paradox of the parasite,” he writes in his seminal work of the same name; “It is very simple but has great import.  The parasite is the essence of relation.  It is necessary for the relation and ineluctable by the overturning of the force that tries to exclude it.”  Where scientific order and knowledge strives for classification, Serres unveils how the very forces it seeks to classify are always exceeding their limits.  As objects of knowledge convey themselves across differences, they attract different kinds of knowers: “I am passing here from the human to the exact sciences,” Serres goes on; “my discourse remains the same—thus noise is the fall into disorder and the beginning of an order.”  There is no absolute beginning of any entity, no origin to which we can trace any object of knowledge.  Serres’s philosophy is more like the logic of fluid dynamics and nonlinear systems, or what he calls homeorrhesis, a neologism roughly meaning “same flow”—that is, the same but always changing.

            In this respect, and despite his frequent association with poststructuralism, Serres managed to avoid the former’s rigid categorical maneuvers, allowing himself a kind of intellectual malleability.  Undoubtedly his style of writing has turned off those inclined to the “exact sciences,” the classifications and tabulations of scientific practice.  Serres never claimed to be such a scientist, however; he was only ever an acute observer of the supposed breaks between objects, disciplines, concepts.  Squint at them long enough, and you can begin to make out the continuities that weave them together.  “Something exists rather than nothing.  The angle is formed; it varies; its space is fuzzy.  It fluctuates.”  If we want to be practitioners—experimenters, engineers, policy-makers—the angles need to be stable and solid.  Not so for philosophers, a principle that Serres abided throughout his life’s work.  He saw opportunity in transdisciplinary connection.  He intuited that narrow pathways that give rise to knowledge by first questioning it.  He developed a methodology of insight.

            And yet even in his lyrical and often circuitous style, we discover a means of carrying out that most elementary of human operations.  In an introduction to Serres’s The Parasite, Cary Wolfe ponders the implications of the philosopher’s writing for the future of philosophy, particularly as it engages questions of science and knowledge.  “Perhaps it is a question of what we think ‘thinking’ is,” Wolfe suggests, “not a reflection or representation but a performance, a practice.”  It’s not uncommon for us to approach writing as timeless, as a system of expression that circumvents the particularities of its production; but doing so causes us to forget that these particularities matter—that writing is a form of thinking.  As I often explain to my students in rhetoric and composition, I never know what I want to write until I’ve started writing it.  A counterintuitive approach no doubt, and one that we necessarily teach students to prune and shear along the way.  I don’t even want to imagine what it would be like to grade twenty-plus papers by freshmen versions of Serres, young minds overflowing with questions and opinions.  Learning how to write means learning how to rewrite.

            But this doesn’t mean there’s nothing useful in following a mind at work, attending to the subtleties—often curious, perplexing, provocative—that propel the creativity of a seasoned intellectual.  To the contrary, it can be thrilling.  This is the literary component of Serres, the poetic faculty that informs his philosophy and made his observations so compelling; for his is a book of differences, noise, and disorder (that is, a fall into disorder and the beginning of an order).

*All quotations of Serres are taken from

Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, eds. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell, Johns Hopkins

            UP, 1982.

The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr, U of Minnesota P, 2007.