Abstract
With some justification, Michel Serres claimed that he was one of the first to make ecology a central question for philosophy. Many of his books explore the ecological emergency and spell out the need to include the more-than-human in any ethical and political response. Yet Serres’ thought has been generally neglected in scholarly debate outside France. To highlight the importance of Serres’ philosophy, I contrast aspects of his work with Latour’s sustained search for a political ecology. I contend that Serres’ thought overlaps with but also challenges Latour’s approach that has increasingly turned for inspiration to the theory of Gaia proposed by Lovelock and Margulis. I argue that drawing from science, history, fables, the humanities and his own experience, Serres brings together a narrative of the commonality of all living and non-living things that exposes a contractable obligation and formulates the grounding for a new politics.
Introduction
From 1968 up to the year of his death in 2019, Serres wrote over 70 books, many of them reflecting on the fundamental reasons for the ecological emergency and spelling out the need to encompass the more-than-human in any political response. Although his work is starting to be recognized more widely (Dolphijn, 2020; Moser, 2016; Watkin, 2020), Serres’ philosophy has been generally sidelined in scholarly debates. He claims with some justification that he was ‘one of the first, if not the first, to make ecology not just a matter of fundamental urgency but above all a philosophical and even metaphysical question’ (Serres, 2016: 60). The urgency of the question that was first fully outlined in The Natural Contract (Serres, 1995) intensified in the final decades of his work. Latour in his unrelenting search for a political ecology has recognized the importance of The Natural Contract but has remained dismissive of Serres’ specific proposals, increasingly turning for inspiration to Lovelock’s and Margulis’ theory of Gaia. In this article, I contend that Serres’ thought overlaps with but also challenges the trajectories of Latour’s approach to political ecology. Firstly, I demonstrate how Latour’s goal of composing a series of ‘loops’ that might draw humans closer to Gaia is reinvigorated in Serres’ philosophy. Secondly, I question Latour’s (2018: 92) insistence that for political expediency we should concentrate on the thin crust of the earth, the ‘Critical Zone’, or the ‘Terrestrial’. Serres shows why we must, as Chakrabarty (2021) has argued, include the deep histories of life and the planet, as well as recorded history, if we are to find an adequate response to the ecological crisis. Thirdly, I explore how Serres’ philosophy brings together a story of the commonality of all things and how this supports his defining idea of a natural contract which, in turn, offers a grounding for a new politics. I conclude by examining how Serres finds possibilities of hope through recent global transformations in the way we communicate. Throughout the article I also show how Serres’ ideas coalesce with some key features of Lovelock’s and particularly Margulis’ research, widening and diverging from Latour’s understanding of Gaia.
Serres and Latour share many fundamental tasks and principles: overturning the old concept of ‘Nature’ that is systematic, deanimated, and indifferent; identifying scattered agencies throughout the living world; recognizing that the objects of the earth articulate and comprehend in multiple ways; arguing that a political ecology based on the composition of a ‘common’ world should include but go beyond a critique of capitalism and the domination of empire; and acknowledging that no existing institution is able to respond to the scope and depth of the existential threat posed by the way humans have exploited the earth. However, when scholars refer to those who have studied the question of extending the political beyond the human, Latour as well as Whitehead, Deleuze, Stengers, Haraway, Braidotti and Bennett, to name a few prominent authors, are frequently mentioned but Serres rarely surfaces. When the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans is set out, reference will be made to panpsychism, a multi-species turn, object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, a new animism and so on, but Serres’ extensively relevant philosophy, which cannot be captured in a catch-all concept, remains overlooked. When calls are made to bring together the sciences and humanities, Serres’ work that is built on the relationship between the two, remains largely neglected. The overall purpose of this article is to try to reverse this marginalization through highlighting his relevance inside and outside the academy.
The general neglect of Serres’ philosophy is partly because some of his most important works have only recently been translated into English. At the same time, his thought cannot be parcelled into an overall ‘brand’. His philosophy is difficult to manage through customary academic modes of analysis which, he argues, frequently act like a tribunal, a process of divide and rule, a form of exclusion and even violence. He sets out to upturn what he sees as insular governing codes of academic practice. But for whatever reason, the lack of regard misses the diverse ways Serres has unfastened many barriers that others have struggled to break through. For instance, in Capitalism in the Web of Life (Moore, 2015), having referred to ‘cyborgs, assemblages, networks and hybrids’, Moore makes the extraordinary claim that no theoretical critique has yet opened ‘the cage of the Cartesian binary’ that divides nature from society. To continue to be concerned about the centrality of the Cartesian binary seems a somewhat moribund exercise; however, Moore (2015) goes on to argue that when Anthropocene scholars refer to humans as a geophysical force, they cannot escape the conclusion that humans operate ‘within nature’, separate and independent in terms of ‘our methodological frames, analytical strategies, and narrative structures’ (p. 5, original emphasis). In this article, I open two challenges. I show how Serres’ philosophy rests on the position that humans do not operate ‘within’ nature, as a detached species. I also argue that Serres is able to take this position because his thought disrupts entrenched ‘methodological frames’ and ‘analytical strategies’, innovatively intertwining ‘narrative structures’ across disciplinary borders.
When witnessing a talk by Latour, Todd (2016: 7) expresses her anger that indigenous thought was excluded from the ‘Euro-Western academic narrative’ with its ‘trendy and dominant’ terminology. Serres (2018a: 108) frequently berates the exclusion of ancient and indigenous oral traditions, and at the same time considers: Dualist thought, realism-idealism, empiricism-formalism, dialectic-analytic . . . the rigidity of nouns: ontology, phenomenology, epistemology, molo, nolo, tolo, internal rhymes: can thought ring true in such ugly writing? (Serres, 2008: 288)
Repetitive and insular terminology lulls the reader into familiar territory, prevents invention and serves only ‘to separate the sectarians of the parish from those who are excluded from the conversation’ (Serres, 1995: 8). Serres (2008) makes a large claim about his philosophy: ‘I have sought passionately: that knowledge and science be forgotten in my books’ (p. 340). Each of Serres’ books roams and brings together different interconnected layers of thought. They form an ongoing conversation – veering, diverging, converging. Resisting classification, he offers a philosophy that mixes up resources from antiquity, fables, myths, religion, the humanities, history, mathematics, communication theory and cutting-edge science. He acts as a ‘troubadour of knowledge’ (Serres, 1997). His thought dances like his favourite ‘figure of thought’, the god Hermes, a mischievous and inventive go-between who encourages adventures beyond the grid of customary theoretical analysis (see Watkin, 2020: 194–5).
Latour and the Figure of Gaia
Latour (2017a, 2017b, 2018; Latour and Lenton, 2019; Latour and Weibel, 2021) has promoted the importance of recognizing the relevance of the theory of Gaia. The latter centres around how living organisms over several billion years have generated an environment on earth that maintains habitable conditions, a form of self-regulation that emerges through the unintended consequences of different living agents pursuing their own interests. The inventiveness of the Gaia hypothesis for Latour consists of granting historicity and agency to all living things. The theory initially developed by Lovelock, and substantiated by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis, found that organisms do not simply adapt to their environment; they bend the environment around themselves. The way oxygen appeared in the Archean period as a poisonous substance, but eventually opened new opportunities for organisms to flourish, in a process of reciprocal connection, is frequently referenced in support
Latour and Lenton (2019) describe Gaia as a ‘reticular, lacunar, dappled, distributed sort of entity for which there is no precedent nor comparison possible’ (p. 672). They admit difficulties with the history and applications of the concept but insist on its resourcefulness. Conceptual tensions are highlighted by Clarke (2020: 36–7). Is it a biotic or metabiotic model? Is it, as frequently defined, a ‘living organism’? Can it be described cybernetically as a controlling system? The struggle to define Gaia forces Latour frequently to ward off misinterpretations, particularly dismissing any sense of homogeneity, totality, or what he calls the ‘tyranny of the Globe’ (Latour, 2017b; Latour and Lenton, 2019). The far-off image of the earth as a globe seen from space is one that Latour repeatedly warns against as it distances us from what should really concern us, the shallow surface layer of the earth that sustains life. More recently, to emphasize the need to concentrate on the surface layer of the earth, Latour (2018: 40) has turned to concepts of the ‘Terrestrial’ and the ‘Critical Zone’. The former frames a forceful ‘new political actor’ and the latter integrates different disciplines that have traditionally been separated to observe the multiple elements that support the continuance of life. The strong advantage of focusing exclusively on these concepts is to concentrate on our immediate environment, close to human concerns where the political fight must take place (Latour, 2018: 138).
Latour (1993) starts We Have Never Been Modern (p. 8) by referring to the proliferation of ‘hybrids’ that are amalgams of human and nonhuman actions independent of the former’s control. Examples include nuclear waste, genetically modified plants, or the fires and flooding exacerbated by global warming. He considers whether the propagation of hybrids could be represented politically in some way, given a democratic voice, and puts forward the idea of a ‘parliament of things’ that draws together scientists, ecologists, industrialists, workers and politicians under a new ‘constitution’. In contrast, the Gaia hypothesis reveals connections, cooperation and subjectivities across the living world. In Politics of Nature (Latour, 2004: 42), he explores different ways of giving a ‘voice’ and direction to the interests of nonhuman agencies. He does not say that forests, galaxies, cells, plants or glaciers have a mode of speech comparable to humans, but he attempts to reveal a more fundamental ground of articulation before the modern distinction between society and nature. It is matter of addressing a question about political representation that is common to both human and nonhuman agencies: ‘how can we get those in whose name we speak to speak for themselves?’ (Latour, 2004: 70). His thought leads to a detailed proposal for a new bicameralism, with an upper house that has the power ‘to take into account’ and a lower house ‘to put in order’. Each house would call on the relevant ‘skills’ of scientists, politicians, economists and moralists, along with the art of ‘diplomacy’ in open-ended negotiations. In An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013: 480), Latour continues to challenge the modern divisive ‘institutional rendering of things’ and works meticulously towards identifying a ‘plurality of ontologies’ (p. 182).
A fundamental argument that runs throughout this body of work is that politics is the ‘entire set of tasks that allow the progressive composition of a common world’ (Latour, 2004: 53, original emphasis). In recent publications, rather than putting forward outlines of institutional assemblies, Latour urges his readers to acquire a new sensibility of a common world. To exercise our freedom and at the same time acknowledge our intimate relationship with Gaia, Latour’s asks us to: slip into, envelop ourselves within, a large number of loops, so that, gradually, step by step, knowledge of the place in which we live, and the requirements of our atmospheric condition can gain greater pertinence and be experienced as urgent. (Latour, 2017a: 139)
Latour (2018) argues that we need to ‘generate alternative descriptions’ of what it means to inhabit the earth (p. 94, original emphasis). He illustrates how traditionally various forms of literature have evoked multiple ‘modes of existence’ and how climate scientists are ‘composing more data, reference points, instruments’ that help us become sensitive to our entanglement with other agencies. Characters in novels, scientific concepts, technical artifacts and natural phenomena expose multiple connections between agents that animate the earth, forming a ‘metamorphic zone’ (Latour, 2017a: 58, original emphasis).
It is in these deliberations on the metamorphic zone that Serres needs to be invited into the conversation. It is important to recognize that Serres always understood the term ‘nature’ etymologically through the future participle naturus: what is going to be born, the act and process of birth, of emergence or inventiveness. Serres (2019a: 14–15) has for decades argued that the old concept of nature that is passive and external to human life must be abandoned. Nature for Serres is captured by the new paradigm of biology introduced by Margulis’ discovery of symbiosis as a major source of evolutionary innovation, punctuated equilibrium and emergent properties (Margulis, 1981, 1998; Margulis and Fester, 1991). Through characteristically technical terminology, Latour (2017a: 140) describes ‘being enveloped in sensor circuits in the form of loops’ that lead to a sense of ‘being of the Earth’. In contrast, Serres explores and gives direct testimony to a diverse range of ‘ways of knowing and being’. He is the composer par excellence of ‘loops’ that draw us to the earth because he insists on thinking through different types of knowledge and scales of time together (Serres, 2007: 133).
Serres’ Journeys to a Common World
It is impossible to do justice to the variety of Serres’ relational thought that is relevant to questions of political ecology, but his understanding of the importance of landscapes specifically and geography generally provides initial clues. Lovelock (1991: 27) berated the ‘tribal’ division of sciences that prevented a ‘whole vision’ and suggested that geographers were perhaps able to see the whole more than most. Serres’ own inclusive definition of geography exposes the multiple perspectives that are required to mount a whole vision. For Serres (2008: 274), geography is the ‘intersection of ten or twenty fields of knowledge’ involving the systems, experiments and laws of the exact sciences but also generating numerous crossovers with indigenous, local, and global stories and histories. Geography transports us from one way of knowing to another. It remains in an intermediate or ‘third’ state between estimations and measurements and stories and history, both practical and theoretical, concrete and abstract. He uses the word échelle to express how a landscape can convey scales, ladders and levels simultaneously. A landscape for Serres (p. 275) can display, like the human skin, a ‘long history of wear and tear’ through ‘ice, heat, larvae, rocks and winds’, as well as the more recent marks left by agriculture, industry and technology and the forced destruction of land though conquests, colonialism and modern warfare. Geography is the writing of earth on itself, an imprint of memories, including the marks of climate change: forest fires, floods, melting ice sheets and rising sea levels.
In books such as The Five Senses (2008), Variations on the Body (2011) and Biogea (2012), Serres explores landscapes through his own encounters and entanglements of his body and senses. He claims that the empirical tradition is ‘bodiless’, but nevertheless there is ‘nothing in knowledge which has not been first in the entire body’ (Serres, 2011: 70). The aim is to practise empiricism rather than write about it analytically, to evoke something that he considers predates language and has been distrusted or stifled from at least Plato’s dialogues onwards (p. 195). He argues: ‘not only does sensation stand behind the knowledge that presumes to speak of it, but what is more, it finds itself ousted by what we know at any given point’ (Serres, 2011: 128). The position resonates with non-representational geography (see Johnson, 2021a), but a comparison between Serres’ thoughts on the importance of the senses and the body and Abram’s celebrated The Spell of the Sensuous is also instructive. The authors overlap but also sharply diverge. Like Abram, Serres (2008: 88) argues that language can mask understanding and overwhelm the things which compose our world. Serres, who thought that the exclusion of indigenous oral culture was a primary case of racism, would clearly support Abram’s (1997: 262) comprehensive study of ‘how the sense of being immersed in a sentient world is preserved in the oral stories and songs of indigenous peoples’. In Biogea (2012: 119) Serres describes singular transformative events, such as experiencing the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. Comparable to the way the writer Ghosh (2016: 15) experienced a tornado that ‘intersected with my life’, Serres (2012: 28) felt the fundamental hubbub of the earth. From that point he says he became – with a prod at Heidegger, one of his least favourite philosophers – a ‘being-in-the-world’. The experience helped to collapse the ‘great separation – insistent, all-powerful – of the intelligible and the sensible’ and to find ways of sharing in the underlying murmur and disturbance of the world (Serres, 2017a: 202).
However, unlike Abram, Serres eschews phenomenology and seeks to escape the ‘subject’ of experience rather than reinforce it. Abram concentrates on sensory perception, the visual. Serres notes that philosophy refers most frequently to sight and sometimes hearing, but rarely to touch or smell. For Serres, sight tends to distinguish and separate. The skin brings us close to other things, bodies and lives and has its own subtle and supple means of apprehension and comprehension. From the traumatic near-death event experienced as a sailor on board a ship on fire, Serres (2008) considers touch is our most vital sense (pp. 17–18). Like a landscape, skin engraves different times and gradations. He also recalls his experience of mountaineering that required the flexible use of his whole body which became part of his environment as it encountered snow, wind or the heat of the sun. At the same time, the attention required forces what he describes as ‘an exit from oneself’ (Serres, 2011: 58). Unlike Abram, he does not aim to become ‘caught up within the sensuous world’ (Abram, 1997: 260, original emphasis). Serres effaces himself, to let the outside in, to convey or expose an underlying ‘common’ sense. As taken up in the following section, he also completely rejects Abram’s (1997: 36) argument that ‘every scientific schematisation is an abstract and derivative sign-language’. Commonality, or Latour’s ‘loops’, can be found through the abstractions of mathematics, the discoveries of astrophysics, the symbiotic relations of microbiology as well as through journeys of the body and senses.
Serres’ varied reflections on, and evocations of, the earth, body and the senses provide a wealth of interconnections of human and nonhuman worlds. He is the consummate philosopher in the ‘composition of a common world’, which Latour (2004: 53) considers the initial fundamental task of politics. But Serres is also the inclusive philosopher as seen in the way he differs from Latour’s recent categorization and separation of the sciences. Latour (2018) fully acknowledges that science is central to ‘survey the Terrestrial’, but in Down to Earth he makes what he sees as a necessary sharp distinction between those sciences that are close to Gaia and others that have a distant and disinterested approach and view the earth as a planet in the infinite universe. He argues that dominant modern sciences continue to be based on a world made up of Galilean objects, a view from nowhere, unlike sciences that conceive a world composed of differing living agents. Latour is very strict if not dictatorial in making this distinction to the extent that we are asked to ‘limit the reach of empirical science’ (Latour, 2018: 76–8, original emphasis). Everything that should concern us inhabits the diminutive Critical Zone and does not require the instruments and calculations of other sciences based on models that are able to discern only things set at a distance.
Galilean physics is often said to mark the beginning of modern science, but Serres would not consider that science today remains within the grip of the 17th-century polymath. I am not a scientist but offer one counter example that relates to a much wider consideration of Serres’ philosophy. The Nobel Laureate Prigogine (1997) has contributed to a science that has developed over the last 50 years or so. The ‘physics of non-equilibrium processes’ has led to concepts such as ‘self-organisation’ and ‘dissipative structures’ that are used in many disciplines such as cosmology, chemistry and biology, including the pioneering work by Margulis (1998), the joint founder of the theory of Gaia (p. 78.) Prigogine’s research starts from remote questions. What are the roots of time? Did time start with the Big Bang, or does it pre-exist our universe? Through Latour’s perspective, these distant questions are distancing, viewing our planet as a miniscule part of the infinite universe. However, these queries do not arise from some extreme asceticism. They lead to theories that in Prigogine’s (1997) own words are relevant to the ‘domain in which human existence actually takes place’ (pp. 6–7).
Latour’s distinction of science that matters and does not matter is unnecessarily conflictual. This is important to underscore as Prigogine’s (1997: 7) research reveals human ‘creativity as part of a fundamental trend present at all levels of nature’ (my emphasis). Dissipative structures – processes that organize themselves and unexpectedly change their form – reveal how ‘pockets of elaboration arise’ throughout the history of Gaia (Margulis and Sagan, 1997: 57). Such knowledge reinforces Serres’ central point that all nature displays complexity and inventiveness, involving an essential nonconformity or aberration that interrupts communication, biological processes and human affairs. Prigogine and Stengers (1993: 150) refer to Serres’ philosophical practice that ‘dissolves the distinction between the macroscopic state and the microscopic fluctuation’ where ‘local deviations echo throughout the system’ and from which things emerge. Serres (2007: 216–17) uncovers diverse ways – from Lucretius’ theory of atoms to chaos theory, to the symbiosis in cell biology, to the behaviour of Molière’s character Tartuffe – to understand that each thing reverberates in every other thing, forming a fundamental alliance.
Chakrabarty’s (2021) collection of essays, The Climate History in a Planetary Age, offers a valuable way of understanding the scope and strength of Serres’ position. The former acknowledges that what has become known as the ‘Great Acceleration’ of the era of the Anthropocene from the 1950s onwards is clearly anchored to the expansion globally of late-capitalism, but Chakrabarty argues that perspectives from planetary science and the evolution of life offer much longer and deeper timescales, dislodging humans from a restricted ‘earth- and human-bound imagination’. He claims that ‘human and presentist concerns’ can sometimes hide the ‘profound otherness of the planet’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 89). Chakrabarty (2021) thinks it is important to reflect on the slow movement of geological time and the biological time of evolution along with the time of empires and capital, but he questions how we encounter them ‘together (in thought)’ (p. 86, original emphasis). I contend that Serres’ philosophy offers a series of ways to answer this question. He persistently rethinks Chakrabarty’s histories of the planet and all forms of life with the human story of global struggles for territory, wealth, and resources (Serres, 2018a: 11).
Serres’ (2018a: 195) philosophy includes ‘the very formation of things, world time, the chaos of the planet, the quivering of living things, in short, our forgotten global habitat’. At the same time, the relational process at the root of his thought helps in building up a wider and inclusive inventory of a common world that is shared by Lovelock (1991: 93), who describes the process of ‘epigenesis’ through the origins of the planet and the emergence of Gaia at least 3.6 billion years ago, and Margulis (1998: 115), who insists that ‘life is a planetary-level phenomenon’. In these narratives of the history of Gaia, the human species forms a miniscule, incidental and damaging invention, but at the same time highlight the stuff humans share universally. Margulis’ book Microcosmos, in which she explores history from the perspective of bacteria, is mentioned approvingly in the opening pages of Serres’ (2018a) The Incandescent (p. 11). The reference to her work helps Serres to substantiate his descent into an encompassing story of the underlying rhythms, flows and forms of communication of all things.
The Natural Contract
Serres thinks through Chakrabarty’s three histories together to form a common story, or what Serres came to call a ‘Grand Narrative’ (Serres, 2018a: 221; 2019b:76). In turn, the latter forms the base of Serres’ urgent call for a ‘contract’ not with nature but of all nature. He argues that such a contract is essential in the formulation of a politics radical enough to respond to the ecological crisis. In 1990, he set out the legal foundations for a pact between all living things, with humans positioned on the periphery rather than in charge at the centre. Serres (1995) starts The Natural Contract by reflecting on Goya’s Fight with Cudgels in which we observe duellists struggling with each other. The two figures present a hostile spectacle, but Serres suggests we might miss a third element – the earth that is gradually swallowing them up. The duellists are up to their knees in mud. Through this image, Serres suggests that we too easily forget the world of things that surround us, a third party in the dispute. What is more, we can no longer ignore the earth. It is starting to respond to our destructive behaviour; the fundamental earth is ‘trembling’ (Serres, 1995: 86). Latour explicitly takesup Serres’ thought in terms of other ‘agencies’ that are making themselves felt and can no longer be considered passive, inert objects. The earth has become an ‘active, local, limited, sensitive, fragile, trembling and easily irritated envelope’ (Latour, 2017a: 60). Serres argues that something completely new starts to enter philosophy, which has been preoccupied with concerns such as the individual subject, being, reason, behaviour, sensation and desire. It must now take account of a fundamental change in the positions of subject and object. The first person weakens, the noise of the world enters and ‘objects wake up’. For Serres, the human-centred relation of power is starting to be challenged and must be rethought in terms of a contractual ‘exchange’, a reciprocity replacing the treatment of the rest of nature in terms of possession and control.
In his article Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene (Latour, 2014: 15–16), Latour calls Serres’ proposal for a contract ‘a quaint idea’, a ‘stop-gap’ measure and a ‘pacific project’. In a later appraisal, in his heavily rewritten Gifford lectures, the idea is seen as more resourceful, but his general view is that the notion of a legal contract has lost its relevance because, since its initial publication, the crisis facing Gaia has become far worse, more urgent and violent (Latour, 2017a: 61–5). However, Latour overlooks the thought that Serres dedicated to the idea of a contract before and after the publication of The Natural Contract. In Branches (Serres, 2020: 187), Serres writes that the whole book ‘celebrates’ and ‘renews’ the contract. Latour may well have stopped reading Serres’ work, but an appraisal should include a recognition of Serres’ prolonged and tenacious deliberations on the need for a new social contract that includes the earth.
As Latour notes in his second Gifford lecture, Serres (1995: 39) poses the question: ‘what language do the things of the world speak, that we might come to an understanding with them, contractually?’ Serres answers that the earth responds to us in terms of ‘forces, bonds and interactions’, and that is enough to ‘make a contract’. As an example, he sees the law of gravity as an ultimate mutual bond. Another example might include the joining of atoms through chemical ‘bonds’ to produce molecules. But in The Birth of Physics, first published in 1977, he had already introduced the notion of existing contractual ties with the rest of nature. Serres (2018b: 22) audaciously re-examines Lucretius’ atomism as a ‘treatise’ on the physics of nonequilibrium, the new science of fluctuations, instabilities and chaos that Prigogine (1997: 3) revived. In re-examining Lucretius’ De rerum natura, Serres refers to the notion of foedus, plural foedera – a treaty or compact contracted by ancient Rome with allied states. Serres contrasts ‘foedera fati’, the bonds of fate or the laws of order that traditionally dominated scientific and philosophical reasoning, with Lucretius’s ‘foedera naturae’, the immanent bonds or contracts of nature. Lucretius’s atomism describes an initial deviation, or clinamen, that disturbs equilibrium to form elemental connections, forms of communication and liaisons. Everything comes into existence as ‘foedus naturae’. It is ‘stamped in the core of things’ (Serres, 2018b: 178–9). According to Serres, this is how Lucretius portrays Venus in contrast to Mars. The latter is the god of rules, repetition, rank and rivalry, whereas the former unsettles, inclines, relates and assembles (p. 135).
In Biogea, Serres (2012: 131) revisits the contracts of nature by describing how elements of the earth already participate with varying degrees of response, awareness and invention. ‘Biogea’ is the name Serres gives in his later work to the world of all living (bio) and non-living (geo) things that resonate with and influence each other. Biogea is in many ways similar to Gaia, but without the misleading connotations that have grown up around the figure that Latour (2017b) has had to persistently dispel. Serres’ previous accounts of mingled bodies and variations of the senses are compared to the way microbes, fungi, plants and animals indicate their presence. For Serres (2019a), everything transmits, receives, stores and processes information. He refers to the detection of chemical alliances, but the discovery of a cell’s genetic code was particularly fundamental to his philosophy (p. 28). The code, the translation of genes into proteins, that emerged from a hubbub of chemicals is everywhere the same, the common denominator of all life. Margulis and Sagan (1997: 63) describes the genetic code as like a sequence of letters that form a word and that can be rearranged to form different expressions, even having the inventiveness of ‘ambiguity’. The ‘essence of life is a sort of memory’, binding the past and recording messages for the future (p. 66). For Serres (2014: 60), recent discoveries of our immersion in the basic elements of Biogea, that everything is ‘coded and coding, caused and causing’, reveal that the natural contract is legible everywhere. Codes that already exist and are valid for humans and all things expose the foundations of a new contract.
Seemingly unnoticed by Latour, Lovelock (1991) in Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine (pp. 154–6), his perhaps most mature discussion of Gaia, explicitly voices the necessity for recognizing a natural contract. He describes the symbiosis of microorganisms as a ‘binding contract’, providing the example from Margulis’s own research into endosymbiosis, a process ‘in which the once free prokaryotic consumers are now forever domesticated as the mitochondria of our cells’ (p. 155). He offers a less specialist illustration of a contract in the way bacteria in our mouth and gut act as a defence. Contracts already participate in our existence and, for Lovelock (1979), articulate ‘what it means to be part of, or partner in, a very democratic entity’ (p. 145). Additionally, Margulis (1998: 119) shows that symbiosis is particularly convincing in explaining big jumps in evolution, for example, new partnerships between different species. She sees Gaia herself as the perception of the whole planet as symbiotic, incessantly creating new environments and new organisms. In some respects, her research can be read as displaying an underlying political – or, in Lovelock’s terms, ‘democratic’ – ecology, tracing the emergence of diverse coalitions. In terms that further challenge Latour’s dismissal of Serres’ specific idea of a natural contract, Lovelock argues that there is a precedent in nature for ‘enduring contracts’ that is so ‘strong that as an intelligent species we already have the map of the way ahead’. He concludes that we now need to recognize our ‘contractual obligations’ (Lovelock, 1991: 154).
Latour (2017b: 62) implies that the theory of Gaia anticipates and surpasses Serres’ (2016) idea of a natural contract. I contend that there is a productive commonality (p. 266), which Serres missed in his own quick dismissal of Gaia as a single organism. However, Serres’ extensive and diverse ecological philosophy unsettles and deepens Latour’s reading of Gaia, as can be seen in part by striking connections with Lovelock’s and Margulis’ wider thoughts, which are generally unrecognized by Latour, on the prevalence of complex contractual engagements and symbiotic relationships. Serres’ philosophy anticipates and reinvigorates Latour’s rendering of Gaia that has been explored in diverse ways by the latter’s interlocutors, such as Bennett (2010), Chakrabarty (2021) and Stengers (2017).
A New Politics
Academics, public intellectuals and activists concerned about the ecological crisis frequently argue for a radical alternative to late capitalism or neoliberalism (see Baer, 2012; Hamilton, 2017; Klein, 2014; Monbiot, 2018). They call for, or seek to discover, the creation of a ‘new story’ to break the ‘spell’ of pervasive political, cultural and social regimes of power that continue to abuse the planet and each other (Pignarre and Stengers, 2011). Like his compatriot Dupuy (2014: 17–18), Serres (1989) acknowledges the detrimental effect of the dominance of the ‘rules of exact economy’ (p. 12), but he sets recent political trends in the context of a much more extensive story. Working beyond the bounds of divisive disciplines and institutions, humans are seen as a parasitic force rather than the pinnacle of evolution. We are an invasive species that has assaulted the earth for thousands of years through ‘hunting, gathering, cultivation, breeding, cities, industries, and transportations’ (Serres, 2012: 107). To put it another way, the human species has predominantly acted like predatory dinosaurs. It is thought these creatures became extinct by the destructive force of an asteroid striking the earth. Serres argues that unless humans radically change their conduct they too will become extinct, but this time through the explosive consequences of their own exploitative behaviour. To dampen any further thought of human exceptionalism, we should recall that the earth recovered and then flourished after the fifth mass extinction that destroyed the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.
How does all this relate to politics? A political or philosophical game of two sides is anathema to Serres (2012: 30–31). He does not sit in the middle or offer a ‘third way’ reconciliation, but he does identify the ‘excluded third’. As we have seen, in the context of our potentially existential crisis, Serres insists that the earth must be included in any intervention. International forums set out to negotiate and compromise to ‘save the planet’, seeking ‘win-win’ solutions, but they usually create a series of games between them and us, friends and enemies, deniers and believers, winners and losers. As Serres (2016: 253) learnt from a conversation with the former United Nations (UN) Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, national self-interest will always eclipse meaningful co-operation when confronting global crises. As indicated earlier, Latour has for decades explored the distribution of agency across the non-human world and considered various ways to conceive how such agency could be brought into some political formation. Whiteside (2002: 130) claims that ‘Latour takes Serres’ philosophical insight and makes it concrete, more empirical’. To an extent this is true, but as Watkin (2020: 374) points out, Latour’s (1993) thought from ‘The Parliament of Things’ onwards remains within the framework of ‘representative democracy’ that binds together different human and non-human concerns and interests. Latour (2018: 33) insists that politics always requires the identification of friends and foes, a clash of opposing ideas, as indicated by the word ‘parliament’, stemming from ‘parley’, to converse with, especially an enemy. Serres avoids concrete proposals, and he is clearly not envisaging in any sense a formal contract that would be drawn up and signed by representatives of the human and non-human world. Instead, Serres reveals the political significance of a series of inestimable open and dynamic contracts that already exist and demonstrates how we should start to think about and engage with the profound roots of the ecological crisis.
To tackle the ecological crisis, or war against the world, Serres (2018a: 138) argues that thinking contractually is indispensable because ‘every war ends one day with a treaty of alliance’, unless it continues to the point of total extermination, or the ‘pandemic of the plague’. At the same time, from his reading of Lucretius and modern physics, Serres claims that everything could have been different from the Big Bang to the emergence of the human species. Nothing is inevitable and so: ‘why not, consequently, cause this or that of these worlds to be born?’ (Serres, 2020: 173–4, original emphasis). Serres (2014: 68) sees his role as a philosopher to hold out ‘hope’ and to anticipate and ‘protect the possible’, an approach that also differs dramatically from Latour’s pessimistic view of the contemporary era. Latour (2017a: 107) decries our ‘bad luck’ and claims that our crisis is happening just at the wrong time when the ‘figure of the human has never appeared so ill-adapted’. Such sweeping negativity smacks of what Serres (2017b) derides in his late pocketbook, C’était mieux avant!, echoing the call frequently made against the young: ‘It was better before!’, Serres replies: ‘When exactly?’ The main emphasis of Latour and Weibel (2021: 14–15) in their introduction to a recent exhibition, Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on the Earth, is the ‘paralysing inertia’ of ecologically minded people, the ‘widespread denial’ of the crisis and a general terrified ‘panic’ in the population. Acknowledging the obstacles, Serres acclaims the arrival of contemporary human capabilities. Humanity may well fail but we need to recognize that ‘never have we attained a sum of possibilities as complete as today’ (Serres, 2020: 143).
Several of Serres’ (2015, 2017b) late short modern fables and pocketbooks address young people and outline specific possibilities of hope. Serres commends contemporary changes, particularly in global communication technology, that might just make a difference. According to Serres, we are at a stage of ‘hominescence’, which is not as fundamentally transforming as gaining an upright posture, or using tools, but nevertheless offers opportunities to evolve differently, to deviate. A particularly important mutation for Serres involves a further transformation of knowledge that has moved from the body of the storyteller to techniques of writing and finally to print. He anticipated the radical influence of digital technologies some decades ago (Serres, 1994: 12). In later work, he also upturns arguments that the latter reduce attention to learning. On the contrary, he observes that we no longer must be passive and obedient receptacles of knowledge (Serres, 2015: 37–8). Witnessing young people working on their computers, skimming through the internet and texting across the globe on their mobile phones, he sees something extraordinary is happening. The way we receive, process, store and send information, the communication so prevalent throughout all living species, and that he has highlighted frequently in his philosophy, is radically changing. Information is literally available at our fingertips. Memory no longer must be stored in our heads or libraries (see Johnson, 2020). Young people, supported by scientists, are becoming aware that the natural contract is written negatively across the earth. Serres hopes that with the help of the new codes that drive computers, the internet and mobile devices, the contract might be endorsed by entire populations of young people and their allies.
Conclusion of Hope
In confronting the ecological crisis, Chakrabarty (2021:196) argues that the ‘political will have to be refounded on a new philosophical understanding’. I contend that Serres’ thought is able to contribute to the latter. His work transverses varied academic disciplines and wider sources of knowledge. He insists that philosophical understanding has to be free to roam across borders ancient and modern. Recognizing the significance of the threats to the earth and humanity some decades ago, he realized that philosophy could never be the same again. His work became more accessible and political in his later years, calling on writers, theorists, activists and citizens to recognize the historical depth and breadth of our crisis (see Johnson, 2021b). Serres points out that the word ‘crisis’ comes from the Greek krino, which means ‘to judge’ and reveals a legal origin. He asks us to judge, to make a fundamental decision about the critical condition of our world. Serres calls for a new politics, but in contrast to Latour’s various proposals for a parliament that negotiates about things, he sets out a contract of things as a way of conceiving the foundation of a new global alliance. He found hope in recent discoveries of science that dislodged a solely human perspective and revealed the commonality of all things. At the same time, he saw the promise of the emerging worldwide access to information and each other. He thought the internet changes our relation to information, but also significantly imitates the interrelations of the world. It could also be said that both new forms of global connection and the underlying alliances of living things mirror the mosaic breadth and undulations of his work. He believed a new story has to emerge that tells of our contractable obligations to the earth and each other. Serres’ thought coalesces with Margulis’ pioneering research into the history of the life of the planet. All things mutate through confronting a crisis, blockage or possible destruction, prompting an unexpected exit, a release, a new branch. Humans must become part of the rebirth and reinvention of nature, which is essentially reciprocal, symbiotic and communicative, before it is too late.
