Michel Serress Milieux
This is an extended version of a paper given at the ABRALIC (Brazilian Association for Comparative Literature) conference on Mediations, Belo Horizonte, July 23-26 2002.
Mitten Drinnen
Mediation means that which stands, comes or moves between things
otherwise separated or opposed. Serress work has never
ceased to meditate upon mediation in every possible sense: as
arbitration; moderation; mediocrity; passage; communication;
combination; exchange; translation; transformation; substitution;
surrogacy. Serres is fond of representing himself as a
cross-over, an intermediary between worlds: a
middler, to awaken from its sleep for a second a
sixteenth-century word. More than a compendium or encyclopaedia
of such forms, his work can be regarded as a kind of
self-inventing machine for mediating between mediations.
There is a Yiddish expression used in London which always gives
me a little jolt of pleasure whenever I hear it. In mitten
drinnen corresponds to German In mitten
darin, which means in the middle of it or
in the middle of things. Actually, in common use, the
phrase might be more idiomatically rendered as right in the
middle: though this is a bizarre-enough phrase in itself.
If it is really right in the middle, dead centre, as we also
sometimes say, then why does the word used to signify this seem
to have a list, in etymologically leaning to the right, as so
many of our words for straightness do? I have already got myself
embroiled in some of the things Michel Serres has had to say
about mediations, crossings, middles and leanings.
Everything that you do is in the midst
says Bruno Latour to Serres at one point in their Conversations
(a title which represents a sort of elucidation or converting
explication of the books rather more exacting French title,
Eclaircissements).
There is something else I enjoy in this phrase, in both its
German and Yiddish versions. In mitten drinnen is
made portable and adaptable to any number of situations by
means of the da suffix, the function of which is to
signify it or that as the object of a
preposition: thus, darin , inside it, darüber,
over it, and so on. So the it, the whatever-it-is
that the expression allows one to say one is in the middle of is
actually tucked away in the middle of the locution. In the
Yiddish contraction of the German, the da has been
worn away, or swallowed up somewhere in the middle of the mouth,
between the teeth and the uvula.
Of course, in mitten drinnen is also a pretty close
approximation to the Classical in medias res. The
phrase derives from Horaces Ars poetica , 148, where
he recommends Homers practice of proceeding without delay
into the heart of things. Although 'in medias res' is often
translated as in the middle of things, it is in fact
an accusative to signify motion towards: thus into
rather than simply in. Michel Serress work,
too, goes into the middle of things. Into the middle of the
thing, or in the thick of things, as we might say in English,
though the Latin idiom looks like it ought to mean into the
middle things, the medias being adjectival rather than
substantive. This is a central ambivalence or oscillation in
Serress writing: is the middle an imaginary place of
absolute equipoise, attenuated into abstraction, the immaterial
seam or soul that runs down the middle of things, but, being
immaterial, does not form part of them? Or is it a middling thing
itself, that forms a part of the interior that it marks out? Is
the centre of the circle in the circle? Is the middle aspatial,
or is it a place? Is the heart of darkness necessarily made of
darkness, or might it be something that resides in the dark that
is not itself dark?
There are two kinds of middle, static and dynamic. There is the
abstract middle, or centre, that part of a structure which is
equidistant from all bounding edges. Then there is the more
dynamic kind of middling or mediation, which consists in a
movement towards the middle, which never comes to reside there.
The line which runs down the centre of an opening in a book
divides it into two, but does not belong to the space of the
page, since there is no part of the page that does not belong to
the recto or the verso. The dynamism of the middle arises when
the middle of the page is folded into the middle of one of the
spaces it divides off, which then creates two more halves, and
another middle into which the centre may be drawn. This kind of
middling is always on the hop, unbalanced and attempt to
re-topple itself into balance. It is a mobile mediation which
seems truly to take us further into the midst of things. It finds
one of its most fascinating extended images in Serress work
in the image of the folding of bakers dough in his Rome:
A Book of Foundations (1983, Eng. trans. 1991) The discussion
of bakers dough in Rome is an image of the complex
overlayering of time in history, an image not of time moving on
and dissipating, but of endlessly regathering itself: The
system grows old without letting time escape; it garners age -
the new emblems are caught up and subsumed by old ones; the baker
molds memory...Time enters into the dough, a prisoner of its
folds, a shadow of its folding over (Serres 1991: 81).
Serres imagines trying to map or model the involutions of the
dough as it is moulded, perhaps by making a mark and plotting its
changes of position in three or more dimensions through
successive stretchings and foldings. To those who can think of
progress only as the extension or unrolling of a straight line,
the trajectory of this point relative to other points in the
dough would very quickly become undetermined, irrational, as
seemingly random as the flight of a fly. This apparent
unassimilability to the spatial intelligence occurs because
we simple blind people, simplistic, short-sighted, have not imagined implication, inclusion, fold; we have never known what a tissue is, never noticed or listened to women, never known what a melange might be, and never understood, or even imagined, time (Serres 1991: 82).
In the folding and refolding dough
of history, what matters is not the spreading out of points of
time in a temporal continuum, but the contractions and
attenuations that ceaselessly disperse neighbouring points and
bring far distant points into proximity with one another. The
totality of these foldings would assume the fractal or
fluctuating forms of natural structures, rather than the straight
lines of the geometrical imagination:
The route from local time to global time, from the instant to time, from the present to history, is unforeseeable; it is not integrable by reason, as analysis has shaped it. It seems to go crazily, no matter where, and drunkenly, no matter how. If the baker knew how to write, she would lazily follow the flys flight, the capricious foldings of proteins, the coastline of Brittany or of Ile dOuessant, the fluctuating fringe of a mass of clouds. (Serres 1991: 82).
The image of history not as an
inert or given shape, exposed and disposed to the investigating
eye, but a dynamism, folding over automorphically on itself,
makes the dough an image of the activity of thought or knowledge,
as well as of the nature of its object. Serres describes this
kind of knowledge as the opposite of analysis, or the separating
of things one from another (for topological transformation
disallows cutting). It is, or would be a knowledge that
multiplies gestures in a short time, in a limited space, so that
it renders information more and more dense, until it forms a
rarer place that sometimes becomes a dark solid (Serres
1991: 78). It is an image of time gathering into history, but
also the image of the way in which time is thought, in time. It
is as though history gains its shape from the ways in which it
reads itself or gathers itself up, as we say, reflexively, as
well as the ways in which its time happens to fall out. History
is the shape that time can take and the shape that historical
reflexion (doubling back, doubling over) will make of it. History
occurs always between events and the shape they take in thought.
The kneaded dough is only one in a huge ensemble of images for
fluctuating mediation that Serres has induced to propagate across
and between his works, of which I will note only skins, textiles,
bags, tapestries, kimonos, rivers, coastlines, clouds,
vortices, mountain-ranges and flames. But it is also a kind
of metametaphor, which figures the topological generation of
metaphor itself. Indeed, it may even be an image for the
relations between Serress different works, in which it is
similarly extremely hard to mark out any clear and determinate
progress from origins to ends, so full is that work of
anticipations, dawdlings, accelerations, rewindings,
recapitulations. The more Serres writes, the more he finds
himself crossing the path of his own sylleptic footsteps.
What has middling to do with mediations? It is not for nothing
that we still speak of the ether when trying to
represent the passage and radiation of signals, for we still,
like classical and medieval thinkers, though without really
thinking about the matter, regard as abhorrent the idea that
there might be nothing between separated or distanced objects (In
brief, the reasoning goes: if there is nothing between separate
objects, then they cannot in fact be separate at all; so there
must always be something between objects, and the void that lies
between them cannot be void after all.) Mediators are not static
betweennesses; rather, they are go-betweens, in movement. Or
rather, in the absence of a void in which to move, they are
themselves movement.
Serress notion of the milieu mediates between channel and
environment. The medium of communication is not only that through
and across which messages pass, but also an environment within
which communication occurs or fails to. These different
meanings come together in Serress conception of the milieu
or mid-place of communication. Serress work
characteristically represents channels of communication as
complex locations, as involutions of time and space, rather than
simply movements between poles or positions in a stable
space. What is communicated is not just the message, but
the medium itself, the social collectivity itself, in all its
stable mobility.
In one sense, exact middles are fugitive, exquisite and rare. In
another sense, they are everywhere, for everywhere we could ever
happen to be would be middling, inbetween times and places, in
this universe of becoming that never comes to rest in being, time
that never fully sets into space.
Mixed Body
From the dough, I move to the skin. If the eye and its associated
cognitive apparatuses seem to set us in front of the world,
rendered for our pinhole camera in a plane projection as on a
screen, our bodies install us as a mobile volume placed in the
midst of the things of men and of the world. We are placed in the
middle of things because we are embodied. The body communicates
with the world and vice versa though the senses, which have
traditionally been regarded as the interface between world and
mind. Most traditional accounts of the senses work by isolation
and reduction. Serress consideration of the senses in his Les
Cinq Sens (1985) repeats and yet undoes this way of
proceeding. Instead of a series of chapters headed Touch,
Hearing, Taste, Smell and Vision, Serres provides us with a
series of meditations upon locations, memories and objects, all
of them designed to show the senses not as separate channels, but
as milieux, places of mingling
The skin is one among many of the senses, the location and the
organ of touch. But the skin has a special place in Serress
account of the senses. This is because it is the most widely
distributed and the most various of the organs of the body.
Unlike the other organs, it is not concentrated in one portion of
the body. Indeed, the skin is the ground against which the other
senses figure: it is their milieu. If all the senses are milieux,
or midplaces where inside and outside meet and meld, then the
skin, is the global integral of these local area networks, the
milieu of these milieux: The skin forms the variety of our
mixed senses (Serres 1998: 59) Serres uses Bonnards
painting Nu au miroir to evoke the mutual implication of
painter and model in the space of the representation. The painter
sees and paints the model as she sees and paints herself,
tattooing her own skin with make-up in precisely the way the
painter will render her. Painter and subject enclose and environ
each other. As she applies her cosmetics and ornaments she draws
a map of her own sensory receptivity, highlighting ears, lips and
eyes. This cosmetography underlines the etymological
link between the cosmetic and the cosmic, for her skin becomes a
meeting place for her different senses: The tattooed nude,
chaotic and noisy, bears on herself the shared and immediate
place of her own sensorium, plains and risings in which mingle
the flows which come from or are drawn to the organs of hearing,
sight, taste, smell, variegated skin where touch summarises the
sensible (Serres 1998: 35-6). Serres begins mapping the
senses with the skin because it is the milieu of the senses, a
kind of common sense. But he does so indirectly,
tacking left to move to the right, by looking at a painters
act of looking, in order to show how the eye loses its
preeminence in the very domain of its domination, painting
(Serres 1998: 40). This painting is already an amalgam or
mediation of seeing and touching. Serres suggests that
Bonnards paintings can be seen as simulacra, not in the
Baudrillardean sense, but according to the Epicurean doctrine
that sight, like all the senses, works through being touched by
simulacra, the fragile films of atoms which are stripped off
bodies and fly to other bodies. Bonnards canvases are
simulacra, not just because they produce semblance or
resemblance, but also because parting from the skin of the
painter and the subtle envelope of things, the veil of one meets
the veil of the others, forming a simultaneous
simulacrum (Serres 1998: 41).
Serres rejects the predominating metaphor of the skin as a
surface, membrane or interface. The skin is an entire
environment. Half-quoting Valérys judgement that there is
nothing deeper than the skin, Serres writes Nothing goes
down so far as makeup, nothing extends as far as the skin,
ornament has the dimensions of the world (Serres 1998: 34).
The skin is the meeting, not just of the senses, but of world and
body: through the skin, the world and the body touch,
defining their common border. Contingency means mutual touching:
world and body meet and caress in the skin (Serres 1998:
97). Serres would see the body as a milieu, were it not that this
would seem to mark it off too exclusively from the world of
milieux or minglings in which it has its place:
I do not like to speak of the place where my body exists as a milieu, preferring rather to say that things mingle among themselves and that I am no exception to this, that I mingle with the world which mingles itself in me. The skin intervenes in the things of the world and brings about their mingling. (Serres 1998: 97)
If the skin mediates the world by mingling with it, this may be because the world itself may be apprehended as a kind of flesh, or what biologists aptly call tissue. If the world is a mass of laundry, then we might expect that, reciprocally, [t]issue, textile and fabric provide excellent models of knowledge, excellent quasi-abstract objects (Serres 1998: 100-1) As with the dough, the object of thought seems to prescribe the manner of its being thought. Serres carries this insight on a little in Atlas, one of a series of books from the 1990s which attempt to map the world of global media communications. There, he , Serres carries this insight a little further, proposing that philosophy might find in textiles a different, intermediary sort of metaphorical matter of which, and with, which to think:
between the so-called rigorous hardness of crystal, geometrically configured, and the fluidity of soft and sliding molecules, there is an intermediary material which tradition leaves to the female, and is thus thought little of by philosophers, with the exception perhaps of Lucretius: veil, canvas, tissue, chiffon, fabric, goatskin and sheepskin, known as parchment, the flayed hide of a calf, known as vellum, paper, supple and fragile, linens and silks, all the forms of planes or twists in space, bodily envelopes or writing supports, able to flutter like a curtain, neither liquid nor solid, to be sure, but participating in both conditions. Pliable. tearable, stretchable...topological. (Serres 1994: 45)
Three and Fourpence
A milieu means literally a mid-place, a place that is in the
middle. But its more common use in both French and English, is as
a context, a frame, a set of framing circumstances (what circles
the stance, what stands around where one stands). It is in The
Parasite, which is what is perhaps his wildest, wiliest, most
difficult, and therefore in a sense his latest book, that Serres
discovers himself as a philosopher of the circumstantial. The
book has as its generative centre the proposition that there is
no message or communication possible without a context or
channel. In any dialogue between apparently free and distinct
parties, there must be some apparatus, some frame, form of
contact which enables the communication to take place; this can
be material a meeting-place, a postal service, or a
network of wires or immaterial - a discourse with rules of
functioning. A conference, literally a bringing or carrying
together, is both at once. There is never, in other words, what
we nowadays so lightly call an interface, an
immediate encounter between communicating parties, nor is there
ever passage of what is communicated across a neutral space.
Something always happens in the space of traversal to slow,
deflect or deform the message; there is always noise on the line,
a spanner in the works.
A spanner in the works. This last expression is a poignant
survival from a newly-ancient world in which nothing that worked
came without its set of complex but compliant, withdrawn, but
revealable workings. But it is a little allegory all on its own
of the logic of the parasite. The workings of communication are
themselves no more than a sort of bridge-work, made for the
spanning of a gap, or traversal of a distance. But the
absent-mindedly misplaced spanner within the works is enough to
make it grind, scrape, clank, eventually seize up altogether.
Something alien, something stubborn and slow, has intervened in
the angelic passage of messages. But that gratuity, that fly in
the ointment, that demon (so often in fact identified in
sixteenth and seventeenth-century cases of demonic possession as
Beelzebub, the lord of the flies) will always intervene to some
extent, because it is the medium of communication, the means by
which meaning takes place (we are really in the mittendrinnen
thick of things here, for what does meaning mean in
English but that which is medial or comes in the middle?)
Interference comes about not just because the apparatus of
communication is too dull to convey the subtleties of our thought
and voice, but also because it is too sensitive, too easily
inflected by the medium through which it should travel
indifferent. Without the sensitivity and responsiveness of the
wire which renders it apt to act as a carrier of the voice or the
word, there could be no passage or message at all. Its risk, its
exposure to interference, is what makes it work. Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari have put this differently but perhaps
equivalently, when they speak in Anti-Oedipus of machines
which only start to work when they break down.
This has to do with the residual materiality of the most
seemingly immaterial processes of communication. Speech is only
possible because of the physical apparatus of tongue, lips,
larynx and palate that produces it. Sound engineers spend a great
deal of time attempting to clean up the wet and dirty sounds that
impinge on ordinary voices the pops and slurps and
catarrhal gurgles or ordinary voices. Under certain
circumstances, these can drown and distract, the background
swallowing the foreground.
Serress meditations on the intermediary and the
circumstantial dimensions of communication in The Parasite
come to a climax with an extraordinary evocation of what he calls
the quasi-object. The quasi-object is a form of
mediation which originally comes into being as a way of fixing or
stabilising social conflicts which might otherwise tend to
degenerate into absolute chaos, or all-out, all-against-all war.
In that it marks the boundary between the subjective and the
objective, Serress quasi-object resembles Winnicotts
transitional object. But, where Winnicotts
model explicates the way in which an individual negotiates its
relations to the world, Serress model concerns the complex
interchanges involved in collectivity. What lies between partners
in a dialogue, combatants, or opponents can be thought of like
the mobile objects employed in games: the ball in a game of
rugby, the parcel in pass-the-parcel, or the furet
(ferret), used in a French game resembling
hunt-the-slipper. Serres explicates the process whereby the rapid
passage of the furet both distinguishes and connects, fixes and
dissolves, the parties to the collectivity and their relative
positions:
The quasi-object is not an object, but it is one nevertheless, since it is not a subject, since it is in the world; it is also a quasi-subject, since it marks or designates a subject who, without it, would not be a subject. He who is not discovered with the furet in his hand is anonymous, part of a monotonous chain where he remains indistinguished. He is not an individual; he is not recognized, discovered, cut; he is of the chain and in the chain. He runs, like the furet, in the collective. The thread in his hands is our simple relation, the absence of the furet; its path makes out indivision. Who are we? Those who pass the furet; those who dont have it. The quasi-object, when being passed, makes the collective, if it stops, it makes the individual. If he is discovered, he is it [mort]. Who is the subject, who is an I, or who am I? The moving furet weaves the we, the collective; if it stops, it marks the I. (Serres 1982: 225)
Serress concern in this
section of The Parasite is to use the quasi-object to
construct a model of intersubjectivity, or collectivity. Most
models of intersubjectivity involve the static configuration of
nodes and connections: sociality as circuit-board or
wiring-diagram. In such models, subjects may interlock with other
subjects, or move round positions, like chess-pieces on a board,
or other invariant ground. In Serress model, what lies
between the elements of the system is itself volatile, and the
whole is held together by what agitates it or keeps pulling it
apart and back together:
This quasi-object that is a marker of the subject is an astonishing constructor of intersubjectivity. We know, through it, how and when we are subjects and when and how we are no longer subjects. We: what does that mean? We are precisely the fluctuating moving back and forth of I. The I in the game is a token exchanged. And this passing, this network of passes, these vicariances of subjects, weave the collection The we is made by the bursts and occultations of the I. The we is made by the passing of the I. By exchanging the I. And by substitution and vicariance of the I. (Serres 1982: 227)
I want to ask here, as I do at
every point in Serress writing in which a story, figure or
myth suddenly captures and magnifies my attention: is this a
model, or a vicariance? Does it mediate the complex processes it
is attempting to describe, or does it participate in, and
therefore perhaps meddle with them? Is it a means, a via media,
a middle way between where I am now and where Serres would take
me, or is it already in the fluctuating medias res, always
leaning, always almost toppling, the halfway house that occupies
the whole space of the journey?
We learn that The position of the parasite is to be
between. That is why it must be said to be a being or a
relation (Serres 1982: 230). Since it is also true that
We live only by relations (Serres 1982: 234),
this seems to put us, humanity, in the place of the parasite.
Serres dares to indulge the risky dream of a paradise of
participations between host and parasite, inhabitant and milieu,
in terms of a sacramental mediation of word and flesh:
Words, bread, and wine are between us, beings or relations. We appear to exchange them between us though we are connected at the same table or with the same language. They are breast-fed by the same mother. Parasitic exchange, crossed between the logicial and the material, can now be explained, At Pentecost, the new-born apostles, suckle the tongues of fire, divided and coming from a single base; at the Last Supper, everyone is a parasite at the masters table, drinking the wine, eating the bread, sharing and passing it. The mystery of transsubstantiation is there; it is clear, luminous, and transparent. Do we ever eat anything else together than the flesh of the word? (Serres 1982: 232)
And yet at the same time,
cohabiting within the same chapter, Serres confronts the problem
of the parasite in a different sense, of a mediation in which
error and distortion occupy, overrun and obliterate the whole
field. For relations can also mean mistellings,
mishearings, and muddy misapprehensions.
A story is told that someone else recalls having heard told by a third, who...[ellipsis sic] Mediations, relations - one can make believe one is lost in this fractal cascade....Everything has changed; nothing is constant; the chain has been mutilated beyond all possible recognition of the message. Victory is in the hands of the powers of noise...History in general as it is written or told is a network of bifurcations where parasites move about. (Serres 1982: 235-6)
I remember as a child acting out
this process of misapprehension in the game of Trench
Whispers. The game, the name of which recalls the imperfect
communications systems of the First World War (though it is also
known as Chinese Whispers), requires a message to be
sent down a line of communicants, each of whom must whisper it
quickly, once, into the ear of his or her neighbour, who then
passes it on. The ideal outcome of the game is given in the story
of how the urgent message Send reinforcements, were
going to advance is deformed into Send
three-and-fourpence, were going to a dance. How
appropriate that the story of miscommunication should be located
amid the mud of the trench, in which the front line of battle
becomes a muddle, a middle. Middling, muddling, meddling,
medleying, milling, mulling and moiling are etymologically
distinct in English, but their shimmering coalescence on the ear
and in the mouth is an example of the parasitic conspiracy of
language both to collapse meaning and to make meaning out of
collapse. Serres has himself been drawn to the image of mud, the
mud that is the inexorable byproduct of battle, and will
eventually, provided the battle continues blindly and ferociously
enough, draw the combatants down into it. At the beginning of The
Natural Contract (1992; Eng. trans. 1995) Serres takes
Goyas painting Men Fighting With Sticks as an
imaging of this milieu that has come into the middle of the
frame:
The quicksand is swallowing the duelists; the river is threatening the fighter: earth, waters, and climate, the mute world, the voiceless things once placed as a décor surrounding the usual spectacles, all those things that never interested anyone, from now on thrust themselves brutally and without warning into our schemes and maneuvers. They burst in on our culture, which had never formed anything but a local, vague, and cosmetic idea of them: nature. (Serres 1995: 3)
Mud can perhaps be seen as a kind
of slack, exhausted, overfolded dough, a material in which all
possible lines of folding have been included, to the point where
there is no longer any difference or potential left. Like many
jokes, it embodies a double movement, whereby a signal is first
degraded into noise, but then the noise rises up, like a tarbaby
or creature formed out of mud, in the form of a new signal.
The difficulty of The Parasite comes from Serress
determination not to edit out any of the interferences, his
effort to render the blizzard of circumstance. Acoustic engineers
are accustomed to distinguish different kinds of noise. The most
familiar of their designations is so-called white
noise, which is defined as the sound of the sum-total of
all possible frequencies. Distinguished from this there is also
what is known as pink noise, which is defined as the
sum-total of that segment of the total spectrum of frequencies
which can be registered by human hearing. When sound-artists and
noise musicians, who have found a new seductiveness in noisiness
over the last few years frame and manipulate the sizzle of static
and the scream of feedback into kinds of work, they are in a
sense converting white noise into pink noise. In Serress
terms, the parasite becomes the host. Serress whole
enterprise, like that of many of the twentieth-century writers
who have been drawn to noisiness, Joyce, Beckett, Borges,
Pynchon, Perec and Ponge, may be summarised as the trick
performed by Maxwells demon of switching randomness into
order by an act of sorting or selective attention alone, the
attempt to pick out the pink noise amid the hubbub of white
noise.
And yet, yesterday morning, just as I was writing these very
sentences, my son suddenly screamed with a voice that expressed a
kind of agony and horror, and carried on screaming. I rushed out
of the room where I had been writing, to see him standing in his
pyjamas in the corridor, his eyes wide but blinded with some
horror, limbs quivering, his mouth wide and uncontrollably
gaping. What had happened? He had turned on the television, which
had been left with the volume turned up full and tuned between
stations, and had suddenly been invaded by the sight and sound of
the white noise, massively amplified, like a deathly, electric
living-dead snow. Just for a second, a chink had opened up in the
screen which normally held the noise at acceptable levels, and it
had spread at the speed of sound, through him and me and the
whole house. These inhuman, panic moments have become rarer in
Serres work, but are still sometimes to be found, for example in
his account of the total eclipse of the sun which took place on
11 August 1999 (Serres 2000).
What makes The Parasite Serress most strained and
painful book is the equilibrium he attempts to maintain between
what he calls good and bad Hermes (Serres 1982: 224),
positive, open, inventive mediations and negative, murderous,
entropic, epidemic mediations. In the work of the 1990s, Serres
has tested these alternatives with respect to the biggest and
most proliferating parasite or quasi-object that has ever arisen
on history, the space of global communications. On the whole,
these meditations have been hopeful. Atlas , in
particular, proposes that we need a new way of thinking about and
representing the world of communications that has already come
about. All previous cartographies, whether geographical,
biological, economic, or political, have depended upon the
principle of logical noncontradiction expressed as a physical
principle, namely that one cannot both be and not be where one
is, one cannot be in one place and in another
simultaneously This is the rule that seems to be set aside
in the world of global communications that makes it possible for
every periphery to be in the middle: a world without addresses
that correspond to unique and determinate sets of coordinates in
the physical world (Serres 1994: 205-6).
At the centre of the book though how, given its argument,
is this centre to be established? - is Serress reading of
the Maupassant story about a man haunted by his invisible other,
a horrifying being who represents the principle of being there
and elsewhere at once: Another puts himself in my place, an
otherwhere (autre-là) or Horla puts itself in the place
of being-there (Serres 1994: 79). The haunted man in
Maupassants story thinks that his antipodean other may have
originated on the other side of the world, in Brazil, in fact;
but Serres reads the story in terms of what it predicts: the
folding together of near and far, here and there, hors and
là, the literalisation of the virtual in
contemporary space. Serres recommends in his Atlas (1994)
an expansion of categories and dimensions in philosophical
writing, to take account of the emerging topological conditions
and sensibilities of the modern world, a new universal in which
the milieu arises in every place (Serres 1994: 128).
In this kind of thinking, everything comes down to, or perhaps,
rather moves out from, prepositions:
Has not philosophy restricted itself to exploring - inadequately - the on with respect to transcendence, the under, with respect to substance and the subject and the in with respect to the immanence of the world and the self? Does this not leave room for expansion, in following out the with of communication and contract, the across of translation, the among and between of interferences, the through of the channels through which Hermes and the Angels pass, the alongside of the parasite, the beyond of detachment... all the spatio-temporal variations preposed by all the prepositions, declensions and inflections? (Serres 1994: 83)
The list Serres gives us alludes
characteristically to a number of his own works, Linterférence
(the second volume of his Hermès sequence, 1972), The
Parasite (1980) Detachment (1983) and Angels (1993),
thereby looping together his topologised history of spatial
thought with his own efforts to open up the oblique and branching
North-West passage between culture and science.
Serress work may be described as a long response to the
challenge posed by Leibnizs monadology once one does
without the mediating principle provided by God. In place of the
guarantee of integration offered by the divine gaze, there are
only the complex, oblique, semi-chaotic but still apparently
self-organising systems which work across nature and culture, and
in which peaceful integration must emerge out of the midst of
randomness and turbulence if it is to emerge at all. Serres sees
the work of the parasite as leading to ever more encompassing
integrations and self-organisations. The risk that his work takes
is to attempt not to skirt the issue, but to plunge into the
mêlée, in the hope of finding integration from the midst, the
buzzing mittendrinnen of the blizzard.
I have attempted in another essay ( Connor 2002
) to mark out three distinct and successive phases in
Serress thought and writing. The truth is, however, that
one seems always to have touched down in the swirling middle
whenever, and wherever one starts to read the work of Michel
Serres. Whenever one thinks one may have tracked a particular
argument, allusion, anecdote, figure, or topic to its source, or
first appearance, it turns out to have been anticipated or
paralleled elsewhere in the work, in another essay or book. The
lines leading from one book to the next are crossed lines. The
work is holographic, self-replicating at every level.. No item
within his oeuvre can stand entirely alone, for every item is
honeycombed with tunnels and passages leading to other places,
other topics, in other books. And yet, so thoroughly is each book
mined with this motion, in Hopkinss figure, that it seems
as though that general, explicating context is actually included
within each book. An important theme in Michel Serress work
since at least the early 1980s is the new inter-implication of
the local and the global. It is as though his own work were a
railway network in which every station was a hub offering a
direct connection to every other station in the network. It is a
structure in which the local contains the global, and the global
contains the local. This is a perfect example of the mobile
mis-en-abîme that Serress work sets up. In attempting to
make out a map that will be coextensive with the territory it
maps, it mimes the relations it offers to model, in which there
is no stable mid-place between the local and the global, but in
which mediation occupies the whole field. Put in the terms of Hominescence,
Serres most recent and surely his most expansively optimistic
book, this involves the necessary embrace of mans
liberation from those principles of limit and locality that have
always both sheltered and defined him, an adjustment to his
incipient infinitude (Serres 2001: 67).
References
Connor, Steven (2002). Topologies: Michel Serres and the
Shapes of Thought. <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/skc/topologies/ >
Serres, Michel (1972). Hermès II : Linterférence.
Paris : Editions de Minuit.
----------------- l (1980). Hermès V: Le Passage du
nord-ouest . Paris: Editions de Minuit.
------------------ (1982) The Parasite. Trans. Lawrence R.
Schehr. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
------------------ (1983). Détachement: apologue. Paris:
Flammarion.
----------------- (1991) Rome: The Book of Foundations
(1983). Trans. Felicia McCarren. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
----------------- (1993) La Légende des anges. Paris:
Flammarion.
----------------- (1994). Atlas. Paris: Editions
Julliard.
------------------ (1995). The Natural Contract. Trans.
Elizabeth Macarthur and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
----------------- (1998) Les Cinq Sens. Paris Hachette.
(First published Paris: Grasset, 1985).
----------------- (2000) Leclipse vue par Michel
Serres.
<
http://www.inrp.fr/lamap/activites/ombres_lumiere/module/eclipse/eclipse_110899/ec_110899-serres.htm >
----------------- (2001) Hominescence: Essais. Paris: Le
Pommier.
Serres, Michel and Latour, Bruno (1992). Eclaircissments. Cinq
entretiens avec Bruno Latour. Paris: François Bourin.
----------------------------------------- (1995). Conversations
on Science, Culture, and Time. Trans. Roxanne Lapidus. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
| Steve
Connor | School
of English and Humanities
| Birkbeck College |