Abstract
While Michel Serres’ work has become relatively well-known among social theoreticians in recent years, his explicit thematization of the foundations of human collectives has gained surprisingly little attention. This article claims that Serres’ approach to the theme of foundations can be clarified by scrutinizing the way in which he poses and answers the following three questions: How are we together? What and whom do we exclude from our togetherness and how? Who are we today? Instead of starting with a ready-made order, be it in the form of individuals or society, Serres pushes social research to take up the challenge of examining the point at which order is about to emerge out of noise and chaos, but where the outcome of the process remains uncertain. Especially relevant to the discussion are Serres’ books Rome, Statues and Geometry, all three of which bear the subtitle Book of Foundations.
‘Order Is a Rare Island’
The Western tradition of political philosophy is often described as a struggle between two camps. On one side there is an emphasis on the primordiality of individuals, whose relationships are originally disorderly and violent. As most famously maintained by Thomas Hobbes, peaceful social life can be founded only after individuals have decided to come together, with the mediation of a contract. On the other side there is the idea that human togetherness in itself is the original condition. Therefore, if individuals become isolated from this initial communality, from the primordial order, pathologies can occur. Although the latter vein of thinking was greatly shaped by Aristotle, among others, it can be claimed that this tradition culminated with Émile Durkheim. It is clear that a duality such as that between Hobbesians and Durkheimians can only be accepted as a picture painted with rather broad strokes; a historian of ideas would surely tint the canvas with more nuance. However, approaching the tradition in terms of this dualism brings forth a couple of issues that are relevant for social scientists. The first is that, by and large, sociologists tend to consider the ‘social’ as something that is always already there; thus, without thinking much about it, they are disposed to side with the Durkheimian tradition that leads one to study how societies change, not how they are founded. The second issue is that a comparison between Hobbesian and Durkheimian streams of thought highlights how a preconception concerning the dynamics of founding can orient the analyst’s gaze. What do we take as premises, as the given order, and what do we think can disrupt this order, for good or bad?
Perhaps most importantly, juxtaposing Hobbesian and Durkheimian conceptions of foundations brings clearly into relief what they share despite their differences. Both Durkheimians and Hobbesians start with an order. 1 Although for the latter it is not a social order, it is nevertheless an order on another scale. The form of individuality is taken as aboriginal; individuals are predefined as coherent, always already existing basic units of human affairs. Further, following the French philosopher Michel Serres, one could claim that the Hobbesian state of war is itself a kind of balance, a form of reciprocity where participants strongly resemble each other, as they are defined by their mutual hatred and fear (Serres, 1995 [1990], 2008, 2015a [1983]). Of course, one always has to start with something. But are individuals and societies the only available building blocks or founding elements that social scientists can imagine?
Serres himself provides an original approach to the question of foundations and order. Instead of starting with either the society or the individuals as ready-made, he begins with fragments, movements and chaos. For him, the basic question concerning foundations has to do with the dynamics through which order can emerge. On the cover of one of his books, Hermès IV, Serres claims the following: Order is a rare island; it is an archipelago. Disorder is the common ocean from which these islands emerge. The undertow erodes the banks; the soil, worn, little by little loses its order and collapses. Elsewhere, a new archipelago will emerge from the waters. Disorder is the end of systems, and their beginning. Everything always goes toward chaos, and, sometimes, everything comes from it. (Serres, 1977; translation by Abbas, 2005: 13)
Before moving on, however, it is worthwhile to briefly locate the discussion within Serres’ larger oeuvre. Among the characteristics that mark him as a philosopher, the most important may be the endeavour to cross natural and human sciences. Serres had a background in mathematics, and during his formative years he was active in working with biologists and physicists (Serres and Latour, 1995 [1992]; Serres, 2014b). He also held a degree in classical languages, in addition to philosophy. In his writings, these early interests come together in an original way. A couple of examples can be mentioned. In The Parasite (Serres, 1982 [1980]), parallels are sought in the way in which parasitism is understood in information theory, in biology, and in the realm of the humanities. When Serres writes about angels (1995 [1993]), he simultaneously discusses religion and contemporary communication technologies, but also the inequalities of the globalizing world. His work on the birth of physics (Serres, 1977) juxtaposes Archimedes’ mathematics and Lucretius’ poetics. The range of topics that Serres treated in his oeuvre – encompassing more than 60 books – is certainly remarkable. This diversity is partly attributable to another of Serres’ distinctive traits, his free-floating writing style, which allows him to make rapid jumps from anthropology to biology, and from mathematical information theory to Montaigne’s works. His texts are essayistic, with few references, if any. Indeed, Serres’ prose is highly recognizable and distinguishes him from other contemporary philosophers.
In relation to the social sciences, Serres was peculiarly both an insider and an outsider. It is not an exaggeration to claim that the question concerning what he called the ‘collective’ permeated all of his publications. Also, with his classical education and apprenticeship in the French philosophical scene of the 1940s and 1950s – although outside of the most popular movements of the time, phenomenology, Marxism and linguistic structuralism – and his vast erudition, Serres was a traditional man of letters and thus an insider in the human sciences in general. This affiliation notwithstanding, his relationship to present-day sociology or political science appears to have been partly indifferent, partly hostile, and often plainly ignorant. Even when he examined phenomena that had received much attention in the social sciences, Serres seemed to discuss them without recourse to other scholars’ works. Nonetheless, in recent years, social scientists have increasingly turned to Serres, finding his theory of the parasite especially inspiring, in addition to his writings on time and space and his emphasis on the complexity and interdependence of the human and more-than-human phenomena that constitute the collective. 2 Much of this interest is attributable to the recognition that Serres has been a major intellectual influence behind actor-network theory (see also Brown, 2002; Dosse, 1995).
Although by now a number of introductions to Serres’ philosophy exist, 3 his conception of the collective has thus far not received the attention it deserves among social and political scientists. For example, while it is often said that Serres is a source of inspiration for actor-network theory, it has been hard to understand why and how, without a more systematic examination of Serres’ thinking about the collective. To some extent the lack of attention may be due to Serres’ writing style, in which arguments are not structured in a classical sense. His sentences roam from bold generalizations to detailed descriptions of particular phenomena. Often, his discourse seems to meander, developing claims through repetitive (sometimes annoyingly repetitive) yet often strikingly beautiful and clever prose. Clearly, the richness of ideas present in his work is not easily accessible to someone who would rather skim abstracts of the most recent research journals. Yet the perception that Serres would be unsystematic is false. Rather, what is true is that his writing style to an extent hides what is systematic and constant in his thinking. In the following, effort is made to clarify some of Serres’ central tenets in regard to the foundations of the collective – or more to the point, what is deemed important is the multifaceted analysis that Serres provides of the gesture of founding.
Before the Beginning: Quieting Some Noise, Clearing Some Space, Reaching a Threshold
‘Foundations’ can be understood in at least two senses that are analytically distinguishable yet partly overlapping. First, they relate to what there is before anything else – that is, to the conditions of possibility that in themselves can be seen as stable. But second, foundations can also be understood more dynamically, as pertaining to the emergence of what there is. Through what kinds of events can order be found?. The latter sense of the term is what interests Serres, with the added emphasis that foundations are not once and for all, but rather are built upon previous foundations.
For Serres, to address foundations is to take up the question of how order can emerge out of chaos. 4 To answer, he tells multiple stories of origins. In Rome, Serres recounts Titus Livy’s descriptions of the founding myths of the state, presented in Ab Urbe Condita (1989). These include the way in which Aeneas arrives from the destruction of Troy, how the nearby city of Alba is conquered, how Romulus kills Remus, and how Romulus himself is killed by the nobles and then sanctified; but Serres also juxtaposes the contingencies in the history of Rome with the way in which a termite mound emerges out of the random movements and encounters of single termites within their environment. In Statues, the stories have more to do with the way in which technological innovation is intertwined with anthropological stabilities, and how human togetherness becomes materialized in objects ranging from tombstones to space shuttles. The main topic of Geometry is the origins of abstract knowledge, how these origins emerge anew, and what their impact is on the founding of what Serres prefers to call the ‘collective’, not ‘society’. In this text, Serres presents elaborate commentaries on the legends about Thales measuring the height of a pyramid, about the rope stretchers, the so-called harpedonaptai, measuring the arable land in Egypt, and so on. What is common to these stories is that they all concern two basic themes: one is the creation of an empty space, a realm of calm, within a chaotic situation; the other is how the chaotic Brownian movements of particles start to create patterns, how entities become attached to each other, and how their movements thus start to display order. In this section, I will concentrate on the part concerning clearing; and in the subsequent section, I will focus on the circulating movements through which things are formed into a collective, after which I will return to the theme of exclusion and eradication.
Ex nihilo nihil fit. Nothing comes out of nothing – unless one counts chaos as ‘nothing’. Serres claims that order is always founded upon chaos, which not only precedes but also surrounds the order. In chaos there is no distinction between form and content; there are no patterns that can be deciphered. In this regard, in chaos, there really is nothing. There is just noise that does not make sense. So, if one looks for ultimate foundations, according to Serres, there is something before any beginning, but this something is really nothing – nothing in terms of signification, systems or order. Nevertheless, while there is only chaos before the beginning, and in this sense nothing, nothingness itself can be positive, not characterized by lack. Even in chaos there is potential. However, the potential present in chaos cannot come forth unless some of the chaotic noise is silenced – that is, unless in its midst an island of calm, a positive void or an ‘empty set’ is created (Serres, 2017 [1993]: xxxix–xlix).
Thus, according to Serres, founding an order implies the clearing of an empty place, ‘the total exclusion of everything in a given site’ (Serres, 2017 [1993]: xlvi). A beginning takes place, literally. In other words, something can only begin in-between. But there is no in-between if the in-between is not cleared in a place where something else has already been taking place. Foundations are laid upon previous foundations. Or perhaps more to the point, Serres thinks that foundations are not so much ‘laid’ as cleared. He claims that clearing is a precondition for the emergence of anything new, and that to produce a positive void is in itself a founding achievement, to be repeated again and again. 5
It is characteristic of Serres’ prose that in using an image of thought, such as clearing, he jumps from one realm of life to another without warning the reader. Thus, for him, clearing can mean cutting a forest or getting rid of weeds with a ploughshare, but it can also mean killing an enemy who occupies a place, if not killing the brother Remus: ‘The same blade serves to delimit space, to cut the earth and to slit the throat of the sacrificed brother’ (Serres, 2017 [1993]: xl). Serres’ claim is that all culture, be it in the form of farming or science, is founded on the creation of a clearing, an open field or a white page – and for him, it does not make a difference whether the original clearing was intended by humans, was the result of a natural catastrophe, or both. The flood wasn’t desired or expected nor was the plowing carried out with an eye to irrigating or sowing; no, like every other invention, agriculture didn’t begin with its own intention or targeted finality: everything happened or was undergone for the sake of cleaning and purification. Men chased the living species out of a given site because a parasite always expels others. Whence this catastrophic tear through which the multitude of wheat, rice, millet could pass, depending on the climates, chances and circumstances. Suddenly another flood rose up, that windfall: stocks of unexpected food. The human parasite consequently multiplies via this rift in the equilibrium and floods the world in turn. (Serres, 2017 [1993]: xlii)
In fact, according to Serres, the empty space of the beginning is usually a basin or reservoir that is capable of accommodating streams that reach it from other sources. As he rhetorically asks, is it not a minor scandal that the source of the Nile, for example, is a basin? The streams that come together in that place reach a threshold of emergence, after which the Nile itself becomes a relatively homogeneous entity that flows downstream. The basin creates the possibility for gathering a volume of water so big that it can form a river. The origins are revealed to be a threshold between receiving and sending, the wavering difference between a basin and a source (Serres, 2015a [1983]: 39, 2017 [1993]: xxxviii–xxxix). After the threshold, the elements that otherwise might move about chaotically can join each other in an orderly movement within the confines of the clearing. Thus, the problem of origins, according to Serres, has a simple solution: an empty place, a basin, must be created, and whatever blocks the streams from gathering and then flowing in one direction must be removed; and this can be generalized to ‘the birth of geometry, but also that of agriculture, of writing, of physics, of the technological domination of the things of the world … thus, in general, history’ (Serres, 2017 [1993]: xlvii).
Obviously, from a logical point of view, discussing foundations is bound to lead to paradoxes, as the very first term cannot be posited without recourse to those that follow. A key insight by Serres in this respect is the impossibility of knowing chaos in itself. Origins cannot be known – other than by also knowing that there is something that one will not know, something that will remain on the side of the unknown. The best enlightenment does not ignore the shadows that inevitably remain even after its lights have been cast (Serres, 2015a [1983]: 59–67, 194–5, 2015b [1987]: 69). This does not hinder Serres from seeing it as utterly important to create a discourse whereby the theme of foundations and beginnings can be addressed. He urges philosophy to take up the challenge of examining the point at which order is about to emerge, but where a return to complete disorder is also a possibility. As something in this founding moment is bound to be left in the shadows, the best way to address beginnings, according to Serres, is to take up stories and mythologies, to hover between what can be stated in an orderly manner and what can only be referred to in more allusive ways. This is precisely why in his books on foundations Serres recounts numerous legends and myths, fiction and scientific information. In all of them, he finds the gesture of silencing some noise, of creating an island of order within a sea of chaos.
How Are We Together?
If the foundations of a collective presuppose a place of gathering, what is it that fills the clearing and how? To answer the question, Serres’ analyses draw attention to how subjects and objects are collected to form a whole. Three key figures of gathering activity can be detected in Serres’ writings: the collective can be ordered through the circulation of what he calls ‘quasi-objects’; it can also consist of a star shape hierarchy between the one and the many; and the order can be solidified through the stabilization of objects, substances, or what Serres calls ‘statues’. These three figures form, for Serres, the foundational ways in which we are together. In the rest of this section, I will review these ordering moves one by one.
First, a central figure of thought that Serres gives for the way in which elements can form an ordered collective is a pattern of circulation. To describe this, he employs the concepts of ‘object’ and ‘subject’ in an original way. For Serres, an ‘object’ is an element that, through a circulating movement, interlinks the entities it touches. These relatively stable entities between which the object moves are ‘subjects’. In other words, objects become objects in relation to those subjects by which they pass. And vice versa, subjects become subjects in relation to the objects that link them to the world and to each other. Together, through the circulating movement, objects and subjects form a collective. Because of this relationality, Serres often adds the prefix ‘quasi’ to both objects and subjects.
This kind of conception of objects, subjects and the collective is omnipresent in Serres’ oeuvre. Perhaps its clearest definition is given in a few dense pages of the book Rome: The object is constituted in and through the relations of the group. […] The subject of the object is always multiple. Conversely, the collective never manages to form without that element I’ve called quasi-object circulating in it, the ball in the team, the peace pipe among the enemies finally reaching an agreement, the common glass at the feast where there is drinking, at the unanimous last supper, the small change at the market. This circulation is necessary for the distributed multiple to become a collective. It’s not constituted by a contract – we don’t know where it’s written. It’s not a will – we never find its subject. It is a token running from body to body, quite simply. There is no object without a collective; there is no human collective without an object. The relations within the group constitute their object; the object running in a multiplicity constructs the relations and constitutes the group. These complementary activities are contemporary. At the same time, the quasi-object transforms into an object, and the scattered multiple becomes a group. (Serres, 2015 [1983]: 86; see also 87–9)
Second, Serres is keenly aware that the circulations that constitute the collective often are not peaceful. When the relations become hierarchical and invested with power, the circulating movement of the collective takes the shape of a star: there is one central element towards which others are attracted and in relation to which others form the points of the star. For Serres, this composition is relevant for studying, for example, the relationship that an audience has to what is happening at the centre stage of a play; the relationship between the citizens and the king; or the relationship between the offering and the crowd that congregates around what is being sacrificed. In the three books on foundations, Serres analyses through multiple examples how potent but precarious it is to be at the midpoint of such a constellation. From there, the subject can be in relation to all, the sovereign can rule over the citizens. But the central place is also the most vulnerable of all, as it is there that the king can easily be transformed into the victim; he can become the spectacularly sacrificed lamb at the centre of the collective being founded. The turns can be sudden. It does not take long for a local sports hero to become the scapegoat for the team’s misfortunes, for a loved politician to become the shared object of hate, or for Jesus to become the crucified criminal of Good Friday right after being celebrated as a prophet on Palm Sunday. What clearly comes forth in these examples is the relationality and ambivalence of who really is a subject and what really is an object. The central person of the collective can be the subject of action as a celebrity or political player; but it is the same position where one is the quasi-object of the collective – that is, following the Latin root of the word ‘object’, one is thrown before all the others, circulating between them as the object of either admiration or hatred.
With the figures of circulation and the star-shaped hierarchies, Serres highlights dynamism in the emergence of a collective. Yet it might be worth emphasizing that, at the same time, the figures help describe the emergence of stabilities as well. Indeed, through them, there exists a certain metastability within the collective. In other words, although inside a system some elements are completely changed, and all its elements might be in movement, the general form of the system can still remain relatively unaffected. The basic form of a basketball game remains the same even as particular players come and go, and the same applies to the workings of a parliament. It is the regularity of movement that constitutes stability. Furthermore, stability thus conceived is not simply either/or but rather a question of scales: what on one scale seems to be wildly dynamic can, from the point of view of another scale, be stable. Of course, this is a basic observation in both natural and social sciences. Molecules can move wildly about in a liquid that, on another scale, is a nice cup of tea. Similarly, seemingly random individual activities together create the relatively stable form of life of a metropolis. Serres’ writings help the analyst to pay attention to the simultaneity of these scales and to the constitutive metastable movements they exhibit.
Third, Serres’ investigations of the foundation of the collective draw from a figure of thought that highlights the ways in which human togetherness achieves more permanent forms; this is in contrast to the first two, which emphasize dynamics. Fixing the collective to a place, and stabilizing its objects while individuating its subjects, is the main topic of the book Statues (Serres, 2015b [1987]). Here, Serres’ analyses start with the acknowledgement that the distinction between quasi-objects and quasi-subjects is somewhat ambivalent, as their roles can be reversed: a quasi-subject can become a quasi-object that connects the other members of the collective to each other, be it as a hero or a victim, and vice versa. Moreover, the flow of life is based on metabolisms whereby what is external can be internalized; objects can become parts of subjects. According to Serres, this ambivalence is overcome by death. He claims that it is death that ‘makes the relation between subjects and objects stable’ (Serres, 2015b [1987]: 21). A corpse does not move, cannot circulate, and is not a fluid element within the collective. It is the ‘first solid’ (Serres, 2015b [1987]: 91) – partly because it is something that we have to take distance from.
In place of the rotting and tattered body of the loved one, a more lasting statue is erected. Or perhaps a pyramid is built so that the once feared and now sanctified king can be buried under it. The corpse thus transformed becomes the first immobile object. A statue marks and stabilizes the relationship between the realm of logos and that which is beyond logos – chaotic, transient and fugitive. As such, a statue is somehow less than a sign; instead, it provides the foundational stability that makes signification possible. Yet as it relates to something that is beyond language, a statue is not only less but also more than language (Serres, 2015b [1987]: 23, 198). Through its fixedness the subjects are also fixed; they and the whole collective are given a point of reference, a ‘boundary stone’ (Serres, 2015b [1987]: 60). We couldn’t live or think without reference […]. In the reference’s very place lies death, which makes space something other than a homogeneous void. Being-there is easily translated into the French language: ci-gît [here lies]: the ancient funerary phrase. […] The corpse makes the stone, and the stone makes the place. ‘Here lies’ [ci-gît]: that means here rests such and such, but at bottom means: by virtue of such and such a dead person, the layer [gisement] for here appears. […] Death causes the here or the there to be born; I was born not far from the place where the forebear is dissolving. I situate myself by means of layer and distance, therefore by means of the interval from death. (Serres, 2015b [1987]: 60–61, see also 32, 74)
It is worth highlighting that, thus understood, death is not only the end. Rather, it also precedes what we have and who we are. The empty place cleared for gathering is founded upon ancestors’ bones. Through the immobility of statues, death marks the outside and helps create order. But it is an outside that exists in the midst of the collective.
Exclusion and Communication
At this point, it is worthwhile to return to Hobbes to juxtapose his thinking with that of Serres. For both, foundations involve a relationship with violence. Yet, the two philosophers locate violence differently. For Hobbes, the social contract is a means with which to tame individuals’ violent impulses and keep them in check. In contrast, for Serres, it is the very process of creating order that entails both exclusion and violence – instead of individuals being originally violent outside of the collective, and then pacified within it, as with Hobbes. But it is important to pay attention to how, in Serres’ writings, the same gesture is repeated inside the collective, even after a calm area in the midst of noise has been cleared. There is chaos and noise within the group as well.
Here it is easy to see why Serres felt that his philosophy is close to the work of his friend, René Girard. Serres’ writings are clearly influenced by Girard’s Violence and the Sacred (1977 [1972]), especially with respect to the idea that the collective can gather around a shared victim or a scapegoat. Serres’ three books on foundations abound with examples of such violence, ranging from sacrifice in classical literature to the apparent entertainment value of contemporary news broadcasts that report on killings, fatal accidents and catastrophes. He also analyzes in these terms the popularity of sports events and, similarly, the way in which repeated images of murder in television series fascinate audiences all over the world. However, Serres’ scope of dealing with exclusion and violence, even in relation to human togetherness, is broader than that discussed by Girard. Instead of starting off with anthropology, as Girard does, the gist of Serres’ thinking lies in what he takes from physical communication theory. Its main point is that all transmissions of messages, be they human or non-human, are based on a negative relationship to the inescapable background noise. As this applies to all of the biosphere, for Serres, exclusion is not first and foremost related to human cultures.
Importantly, ‘noise’ or ‘chaos’ are here defined by Serres as something other than substantial states of matter. In other words, although in Serres’ analyses chaos is primordial, unavoidable and omnipresent, it does not have to be substantially chaotic. Instead, noise is simply what is seen as disturbing from the point of view of communication. It is what hinders messages from going through. ‘Chaos’, ‘noise’ and ‘disorder’ are revealed to be relational notions. They consist of all the forces that disturb, prevent or block communication and against which the communicators must fight together (Serres, 2014b: 139; for longer elaborations of the theme see especially Serres, 1969, 1982 [1980] and 1995 [1982]).
It is noteworthy that in this scheme, while the excluded world is negated, it is simultaneously also affirmed, as the negation itself is something that is shared by those who communicate. The collective, and the communication within it, obtains its contours against the excluded shapelessness of the multiplicity outside. To illustrate this idea, Serres begins The Natural Contract (1995 [1990]) with a description of a famous painting by Goya, Fight with Cudgels. The work pictures two men engaged in a mortal battle while being devoured by the shaky ground of a quagmire. The harder they hit each other, the deeper they sink. According to Serres, the situation can be analyzed as implying four poles. In addition to the two fighters who communicate by means of blows, the third pole represents the channel of communication or the objective that the two fighters share – that is, the fighting activity itself; yet, fourth, they also share the will to exclude the noise from their surroundings or whatever else might disrupt their sharing of the thing in-between them – and it is their deafness to their external condition that ultimately dooms them (1995 [1990]: 9). Serres generalizes this constellation, which he thinks is foundational, and has a broader field of application than what Girard would think. Nothing is more ancient than the excluded middle or third, to be understood at once in every sense, drawing, discourse and religion. The excluded middle or third is the scapegoat: the scapegoat is at the foundation of anthropology, the excluded middle at the foundation of our logic. (Serres, 2015a [1983]: 126)
Who Are We Today?
Treating the question concerning foundations in terms of chaos and order can easily lead one to emphasize spatial relations. Order here, inside; chaos there, outside. Yet, for Serres, foundations do not simply emerge in time but concern the emergence of different times; if in chaos there is no order, then there is no succession of events either (Serres and Latour, 1995 [1992]: 44–70; see also Assad, 1999; Connor, 2004; Bingham and Thrift, 2000). 8 More concretely, many of Serres’ texts can be regarded as endeavours aimed at coming to terms with how our particular times were founded and what is distinctive about them (Frémont, 2010). As one of the major themes of social science and philosophy, this question was formulated by Michel Foucault, himself following Immanuel Kant, as: ‘What difference does today introduce in respect to yesterday?’ (Foucault, 1984: 34). With Serres, the issue is transformed and operationalized into asking: What are the particular quasi-objects that circulate between us, and how is their circulation now assembled? Are our exclusions different from those evident in other times? 9 In order to address this thematic area, here I will restrict myself to brief indications of how Serres answers these questions in some of his books.
To begin with, in ‘Trahison: la thanatocratie’, an essay published in 1974, Serres discusses the nuclear era and how it is defined by what he calls ‘world-objects’ (Serres, 1974: 101). The novelty of world-objects is that they all have at least one global dimension through which they help to constitute a collective on a completely new scale; it is their circulation that creates humanity as a global subject. Serres’ examples for world-objects include satellites for speed, atomic bombs for energy and nuclear waste for time. Since the publication of the article, new world-objects have emerged; now, the obvious and paradigmatic example of these would be climate change (Serres, 1995 [1990], 2008). But the list could also include the internet and global financial markets or different kinds of waste particles, such as carbon emissions or the tiny pieces of plastic that travel around oceans (on pollution, see also Serres, 2010 [2008]). 10
If the internet is among the things that Serres calls ‘world-objects’, then it is also linked to the more diffuse collectives assembled with the mobile phone. These are studied in Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials (2014a [2012]), where Serres analyses how this particular form of technology creates new ways of being together, and simultaneously helps to distinguish new generations from older ones. Communications more broadly are the subject of Serres’ book Angels (1995 [1993]). While foregrounding air travel and the sterile terminals that make it possible, the text provides a powerful analysis of present-day forms of exclusion, also in terms of health, nourishment and general poverty. In an era where there are always, at any specific moment, thousands of people enjoying their meals in airplanes up in the sky, having a ‘high’ or ‘low’ social status is a more concrete metaphor than ever before.
The essay Times of Crisis (2013 [2009]) further elaborates on global transformations. Among the developments that define the contemporary, Serres considers, for example, the end of the Neolithic period, which was brought about by transformations in agricultural work; a demographic revolution and the health sciences behind it; new connections between people, including both physical transport and digital communications; and finally, new means of warfare. An even greater temporal scope is taken in four books from the early 2000s, in which Serres discusses the ‘Grand Narrative’ of the human species and its evolution (Serres, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004). It is noteworthy how, in these studies, Serres’ analyses traverse scales. While the main temporal order is given by the geographical distribution of humans and the dramatic enlargement of the species’ influence, at the same time it is the story of the development of private bodily practices and the transformation of aesthetic standards, or of the unprecedented powers recently provided by algorithmic thinking (see also Serres, 2016 [1985]).
For Serres, the human being is the species without essence, the species that constantly makes itself anew. It is not the end product of hominization. Rather, the contemporary forms of being human are only stages of a larger process of ‘hominescence’, of a species-becoming that does not have a destination or telos (Serres, 2001). It is a species that is characterized by its openness for transformations (Hénaff, 2010). Instead of simply following the behaviour determined by the genetic code, and thus being stuck with a rigid order, as those species have done which have remained unchanged during multiple geological periods, human beings are characterized by their capability to create ever new clearings at the edge of chaos: places of calm where innovation can begin.
Conclusions: Foundations in the Midst of Chaos
The reader might ask: What is the status of Serres’ discourse on foundations? Are his analyses meant to be empirical descriptions, or do they present theoretical theses that should be tested? Do they amount to something other than armchair social philosophy and simple metaphysical declarations? None of these options really hit the mark. Rather, for a social scientist, Serres’ texts are best seen as providing pragmatic tools that can be used for examining the various ways in which a collective can be founded and assembled; this usage is also exemplified by his own writings, as reviewed in the previous section. Bruno Latour has coined an apt phrase for describing such tools, saying that they comprise the ‘metaphysical minimum-wage’ (Latour, 2004: 61; see also Hämäläinen and Lehtonen, 2016), the smallest amount of metaphysics needed for getting on with thinking. Indeed, the discursive tools provided by Serres are meant to be simple and open – ‘white concepts’ (Serres, 2003: 101). These are applicable to highly different phenomena and situations, and yet each helps to make distinctions that present the world in a new light.
Some of the best examples of deploying the Serresian approach to the formation of collectives are given by Latour himself. His study on the ‘Circulating Reference’ (1999: 24–79) follows the way in which a research project on soil is able to create information by combining multiple layers of exclusion and transformation of what circulates within the research team and the broader academic public, through various means of ordering data and recording it. Another useful example is Latour’s and Émilie Hermant’s book, Paris ville invisible (1998). They show with pictures and text how ‘Paris’ is made of infrastructures that all circulate their own items – for example, water, waste, votes, street names, lighting and electricity, but also tourists and workers – through various conduits, such as communication networks, pipes, roads or news broadcasts. The singularity of Paris is defined by the overlapping of these multiple circulations and their maintenance. In these texts by Latour, the Serresian idea that the quasi-object is a ‘tracing element’ that helps to construct the collective is methodologically central. 11
However, thus far, surprisingly little attention has been paid to Serres’ explicit thematization of foundations and, especially, how they take place in relation to chaos. In this respect, Serres’ writings sensitize social scientists to aspects that have remained marginal also in the actor-network theory: the relationship with chaos, the presence of violence in the foundations, and the need for places of calm. In the three books Rome, Statues and Geometry, Serres pushes research to address the points at which stability is formed but also at which the outcome of the process remains uncertain. This implies that one is willing ‘to think the margin that separates the multiple and the ordered, the moment when the solid is on the verge of hardening into pressed crystals’ (Serres, 2015 [1983]: 210). Thus, to address foundations is not only to tackle them with the kind of fragmented multiplicity that resists names and concepts, and on the edge of which a collective can take shape, but also to be attentive to the dynamic states of being that are not clearly ordered nor chaotic. The multiple becomes one by a change of phase. We have to be attentive to the intermediary states; it is true that our knowledge of the collective often stops at states, I mean equilibriums, at institutions, at classes, at subclasses, in short at a statics, even and above all when this knowledge hides the statics by means of a dynamized discourse. However, the collective changes phase; it experiences intermediary states, turbulent states that don’t merit the name of states. (Serres, 2015 [1983]: 209)
Serres leads social scientists into thinking that human togetherness is not founded once and for all, but again and again. Foundations are not simply somewhere else, far behind us, in history. New ways of being together can emerge here and now. And even after being established, foundations remain unstable and retain their relationship to chaotic uncertainty. In fact, Serres produces an original philosophy of beginning. He leads the present-day scholars to look for places and events where forms of togetherness emerge, but does not reduce the beginnings to individuals’ initiatives or to pre-existing social structures. Serres wants us to pay attention to the situations where stabilities are created out of what appears to be chaotic.
Thus, in contrast to the Hobbesian narrative, it is important to note that there is not just one story of foundations but multiple stories that encounter multiplicities differently. Against the Durkheimians, there is an emphasis that these stories indeed must be told. Order cannot be presumed to pre-exist the foundational gesture of ordering itself that is repeated in ever new foundations. In other words, although humans are born to collectives that they encounter as always already founded, these collectives are founded anew today. But how? In order to answer this question, we can go to where the noise is silenced and where the streams gather. We can follow how things start to circulate and collect quasi-subjects around them. We can see what and who is being excluded. In this way, we learn to understand who we are today. We discover how the foundations of the contemporary are built. They are revealed to be dynamic, taking place on many scales, and implying not only one distinction between inside and outside but many layers of integrative circulations and exclusions.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the three anonymous referees for their valuable comments and critiques. In addition, I gratefully acknowledge the discussions I have had on this paper with Mikko J. Virtanen, and on Serres more generally, with Olli Pyyhtinen.
