The Devil’s Interval: Grand Challenges and Transdisciplinarity in the Anthropocene

Abstract

New kinds of transdisciplinary thinking have been promoted as a way of addressing the ‘Grand Challenges’ and ‘perma-crises’ associated with the Anthropocene. Often, however, they (inadvertently) maintain the social sciences and humanities in a subservient position. The ‘elemental turn’ and other forms of planetary thought show renewed interest in, and engagement with, the sciences – but they also reinforce problematic assumptions about the relation between ‘science’ and other practices, and about the traffic and direction of knowledge. In this article, we develop an understanding of the nature of transdisciplinary instruction that does not rely on a global dichotomy between the sciences and humanities. We elaborate two contingent series, one of (Western) science and reason and one of madness and unreason. The series communicates through dissonance rather than consonance across a plane stretched between them, which we call the devil’s interval. This is where novel concepts travel. In conclusion, we reflect on the implications of the devil’s interval for joint transdisciplinary instruction.

Introduction

The Anthropocene serves as a marker for a range of ‘perma-crises’: climatic, economic, social, political, postcolonial, spiritual, existential and others. While these crises are heterogeneous, it is often assumed that a particular form of knowledge – objective science – allows us to grasp their actual nature. As Clark and Szerszynski (2020: 4) assert, ‘for growing numbers of people, everyday experience and longer-term cultural memory confirm that something is amiss with the global climate. But for many of us, it is science that is providing the grammar to frame and speak of such experiences.’ Planetary Social Thought, their term, and what has come to be known as an ‘elemental turn’ (Engelmann and McCormack, 2021; Neale et al., 2022; Papadopoulos et al., 2021; Peters, 2015) are among recent calls to rethink relations between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities in the Anthropocene.

A famous predecessor of such calls was formulated by Bachelard (1984), who boldly proclaimed a ‘new scientific spirit’. His understanding of scientific development centred on the idea of using new concepts to epistemologically break with common sense and experience. It would no longer be the task of philosophers to clarify the foundations of scientific knowledge. Because of their unique capacities for epistemic invention, the sciences were instead tasked with instructing all other practices. But things have changed. Bachelard wrote in a context of institutional and cultural security for philosophy and the wider humanities. That is now far from the case.

In the United Kingdom and across Europe, the fate of the humanities and the social sciences is increasingly yoked to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) subjects as epistemic underlings. In the UK, these developments are platformed by the British Academy through the notion of Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy (SHAPE), where the big idea is to seamlessly integrate objectivist science into society with the help of soft interpretive skills from social science or the humanities (https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/this-is-shape/). In other words, a kind of ‘plug and play’ model of interdisciplinarity.

A similar logic is in play when the social sciences and humanities are invited to participate in ‘Grand Challenges’ (GC) research, which aims to solve the major issues confronting humanity through systematic, multidisciplinary teamwork and ‘moonshot’ projects without time or incentive to work around epistemic inconsistencies. Thus, we confront a paradox. While the Anthropocene urgently requires a rethinking of relations between natural and social sciences, an obsession with quick wins makes invention across deep-seated epistemic and ontological differences virtually impossible. With Grand Challenges research as little more than a badge, or an empty signifier, for the powers of STEM (Carton et al., 2024), it is virtually impossible to turn these types of collaborations into sophisticated conjunctions of knowledge or sources of joint instruction. As Michel Serres once observed:

Have you noticed the popularity among scientists of the word interface – which supposes that the junction between two sciences or two concepts is perfectly under control? On the contrary, I believe that these spaces between are more complicated than one thinks. This is why I have compared them to the Northwest Passage . . . with shores, islands, and fractal ice floes. Between the hard sciences and the so-called human sciences the passage resembles a jagged shore, sprinkled with ice, and variable . . . It’s more fractal than simple. Less a juncture under control than an adventure to be had. (Serres and Latour, 1995: 70)

This article seeks to develop an understanding of the ecology of knowledges and the nature of transdisciplinary instruction that does not rely on any global dichotomy between the sciences and humanities and, therefore, does not seek to resolve tensions between the disciplines through ‘dialogue’ at an ‘interface’.

We begin by considering the emergence of the elemental turn as a particular kind of response to the Anthropocene. We show that these studies tend to configure transdisciplinary relations as a form of one-way traffic from natural science to social science and the humanities. Seeking an alternative, we find inspiration in Serres’s (1980) Northwest Passage and Deleuze’s (2004: 184) argument that a ‘problematic’ involves two divergent series brought into communication by ‘a great mobile element’.

We elaborate two contingent series, one of (Western) science and reason and one of madness and unreason. The series operate with different navigational principles, which scarcely bear any resemblance to the image of two disciplinary cultures of science and the humanities. Stretched between the series is a plane, which we call the devil’s interval. ¹ The crux of our argument is that the series are made to communicate through dissonance as concepts travel across this interval, a process we show at work in controversies around the dating and meaning of the Anthropocene itself. In conclusion, we consider the limits of the existing ecology of knowledges and reflect on the implications of the devil’s interval for joint transdisciplinary instruction (i.e. taking our navigational bearings at different points from the two series) in the context of grand Anthropocene challenges.

Lost in the Elements

Compiling a wide variety of literature published in anthropology, cultural studies, geography, and media studies over the last 15 years, Engelman and McCormack (2021) argue that the present moment bears witness to an ‘elemental turn’. Recognizing that planetary problems implicate many more-than-human beings, this turn takes a page from the new materialist proposition that social theory requires a ‘rapprochement’ with new scientific developments (Coole and Frost, 2010: 3; see also Clark, 2011). The editors of Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions declare that the material specificities of elements form ‘the compass for our thought and actions’ (Howe et al., 2023: 18).

We take the elemental affirmations as symptomatic of broader reconfigurations of the ecology of knowledges in response to Anthropocene disruptions. The signature move is to treat core materials of science and natural philosophy – fire, water, earth, air – as entry point analyses that mix earth forces with sociocultural dynamics and show human and nonhuman bodies as ‘constitutively immersed with different degrees of influence’ (Engelman and McCormack, 2021: 1425) in the elements.

Many of the elemental studies are stimulating, and some are quite inventive (e.g. Papadopoulos et al., 2021). However, reactivating the elements in cultural analysis requires a good deal of finesse given their scientific baggage, especially since scientists are themselves also increasingly adept at it (e.g. Lane, 2023; Margulis and Sagan, 2000; Zalasiewicz et al., 2017). There are large variations around how the elements are articulated with science. However, these studies share a common tension between programmatic claims to bypass distinctions between nature and culture, science and humanities, materiality and metaphor, and continued reliance on the same distinctions in analytical practice. From one side, the historian Duara (2021: 144) bluntly asserts that ‘ontological links’ between oceans, atmospheres, and historical movements are revealed by ‘the basic laws of physics and the science of flow designs and patterns’. From the other, the media theorist Young (2020: 135) acknowledges that his studies of salt as an ‘elemental medium’ that shapes the ‘supply chains of digital culture’ are as much about metaphor as materiality (also Cohen and Duckert, 2015; Howe et al., 2023).

In a study of radioactive glasses and elemental memory, Engelmann (2022: 158) affirms her substantial debt to ‘geologists and nuclear forensics experts’ for guidance and insights about isotopes and radiation. But she also argues, with inspiration from the article ‘What the Sands Remember’ by the anthropologist Agard-Jones (2012), that ‘memory is not necessarily enclosed by the human brain but may be swirling around in the ocean or migrating with a sand dune’ (Engelmann, 2022: 156). Many scientists would likely balk at this claim. However, it is also a rather free extrapolation from Agard-Jones’s original argument. To be sure, her queer analytics depicted sand as a ‘repository both of feeling and of experience, of affect and of history’ (Agard-Jones, 2012: 325). But while she imagined sand as ‘“saturated” with the presence of people’ (p. 325), these were only metaphorical memories of sand – the actual memories were held by those people who had ‘walked on it and carried it’ (p. 325). The volatility of the elemental turn is exhibited in such movements back and forth between materiality and metaphor.

In a similar analytical movement, Engelmann and McCormack (2021) end, after many figurative applications of the elements, by emphasizing their potential lethality with reference to PM 2.5 concentrations and the Covid-19 death rate established objectively by medical scientists. Like Duara’s oceanic paradigm defined by the laws of physics, the structure of the object, as determined by science, reemerges as the framework through which the social science and humanities issue must ultimately be considered. With all epistemic travel going in one direction – from science to culture – it is hard to imagine any reverse movement from which joint instruction might emerge. ² Transdisciplinarity stands no chance as long as the social sciences and humanities are only imagined as adding toppings to matters of fact that have been objectively determined by science.

These elemental variations differ markedly from Michel Serres, who imagined transdisciplinary relations as a matter of crossing the Northwest Passage. Traveling this passage is dangerous and entails adventure as well as the risk of getting lost at sea. Such dangers and risks are exemplified in Serres’s bold comparison of Musil’s (1996 [1953]) The Man without Qualities and Wiener’s (1948) Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Serres, 1978). Musil’s prodigiously long novel narrates the travails of the protagonist Ulrich, who aimlessly wanders through the final days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. A sense of narrative progression is lost within long digressions about various ideas and existential problematics. For example, Chapter 1 is headed ‘1. Which, remarkably enough, does not get one anywhere’. It describes an atmospheric ‘depression’ over the Atlantic and current phases of the moon as predicted by astronomical yearbooks, before commenting on a road accident in Vienna (although ‘no special significance should be attached to the name of the city’).

Wiener’s Cybernetics also begins with a discussion of meteorology and astronomy referring to a ‘little hymn or song familiar to every German child’, telling of how God counts the stars and clouds. He notes that astronomy, in its classical form, was organized around Newtonian mechanics and concerned with laws and predictions. Meteorology, by contrast, deals with ‘a vast number of approximately equal particles’ which enter complex and irreversible relations with one another. Cloud formation cannot be predicted, and the form of the cloud is not determined by its conditions of emergence – ‘the terms “cloud”, “temperature”, “turbulence” etc., are so many terms which refer to no particular physical situation, but to a distribution of possible situations of which only one actual case is realized’. A yearbook or catalogue of clouds would be laughable, Serres (1978: 15) notes, since ‘clouds, whirlwinds, flows, noises, [are] all primary masses without qualities’. ³ At every point, the observer is confronted with circumstances where ‘information is partial and therefore generally quite unreliable’ (Serres, 1978: 17). ⁴ In both cases, initial conditions fail to predict subsequent outcomes (they ‘do not get one anywhere’).

To those seeking to cross the Northwest Passage, partial, approximate, and unreliable information is all that is available. The point of departure does not determine the nature of the voyage, and it is often more important to try to stay alive than focusing on the planned destination. Of course, some sense of direction relative to the immediate environment is critical. Thus, navigation proceeds by dead reckoning, using landmarks, estimates of previous locations, and the stars, as celestial reference points. But the heterogeneous elements that make up the surroundings are only temporary reference points within a larger, unknown whole.

Dead reckoning makes it possible to reposition the ‘dialogue’ between the sciences and humanities/social sciences in terms of variable navigations through unknown epistemic or ontological waters. Heuristically, we approach these uncertain reckonings as two emergent ‘series’ of science and of madness. Each is comprised of distinctive elements and transformational qualities, which form complicated relations without mapping any established cartography. The journey is not under our control.

The notion of series is taken from Deleuze (2004), where it refers to terms with an unspecified content that vary in relation one another. For example, Hudson Strait, Foxe Basin and Fury Strait might be considered as three terms in a potential series called ‘The Eastward Northwest Passage’, but their relation is not specified in advance. Their individual meaning as placeholders of potential geographic locations will be produced from within the series. Deleuze also suggested that structure is an effect of juxtaposition of two different series. So, a geographical structure begins to emerge when another series, consisting of Vikings, Franklin, Amundsen, appears as ‘explorers’ or ‘colonists’ or ‘cartographers’ who seek to map and name places in the landscape.

At this point, variations within each series can be explored in relation to each other without determining the exact form and trajectory of the mobile element that passes between them in advance. In the next sections, we will propose two different series – science and madness – as a way of articulating a different image of knowledge production. Juxtaposition and movement between these series – across the devil’s interval – generate an idea of transdisciplinarity entirely different from integration, interface and dialogue.

The Series of Science

While Gaston Bachelard formulated his ideas of epistemological breaks and the new scientific spirit, the Polish medical practitioner and amateur historian Ludwik Fleck (1979 [1935]) developed an entirely different view of the emergence of scientific facts. His studies showed the construction of facts as the work of a community of people (or ‘thought collective’) who develop shared forms of language – or what he called a ‘thought style’ – consisting of ‘ideas and assumptions and related perceptual, classificatory and behavioural dispositions’ (Smith, 2005: 49). Science travelled along ‘a meandering path full of false assumptions, vague hunches, unsuccessful experiments, lucky accidents [as well as] useful ideas, methods and technical adjustments by many different people’ (Smith, 2005: 54). Rather than following an inexorable logic, scientific breakthroughs emerged from contingent events.

Every thought collective is constrained by its thought style. Constraints are generative: a collective will be able to perceive certain entities or phenomena with clarity and engage them with precision. But they are also limiting: the same collective will be unable to recognize, grasp, or understand many other processes and elements. These patterns of insight and blindness are why the making of scientific facts often depends on many interacting collectives that complement and challenge each other. But lack of mutual understanding and conceptual inconsistencies between thought styles also lead to clashes, controversies, and stalemates: a chaos of contingent events. What we call a scientific fact is what is left after the dust has settled and the thought collectives have negotiated their differences. As for the facts, Fleck argued that they were in themselves mere pauses in the flux of time. They will be challenged, transformed, or discarded in the future.

Fleck wrote at the same time as Karl Popper (1935), who had begun his very influential Logic of Scientific Discovery with a quotation from Novalis: ‘Theories are nets: only he who casts will catch.’ But with truth as an ‘event in the history of thought’ (Fleck, 1979: 100), it is the other way around. Truth itself is the fluctuating net. Thus, we are far from Bachelard’s new scientific spirit defined by a constant labour to purify methodologies and epistemes. Indeed, objectivity and rationality are useless criteria for judging whether thought styles are scientific: thought collectives rely on neither in the process of making science. Science is not logical and progressive, but variable and transformational.

Fleck’s unorthodox image of science was picked up by the historian of science Thomas Kuhn (1962). Kuhn, too, found that science does not progress in a linear or logical fashion. From his historical studies, he extracted a general pattern with long periods of relative stability interrupted by bursts of dramatic change. Stability was provided by a ‘paradigm’ – a thought style writ large – comprising the theories and methods that scientists use to solve problems. But anomalies sometimes begin to accumulate. During such times, the paradigm becomes available to collective scrutiny, and this can lead to abrupt scientific revolutions that wash away entire repertoires of thought and practice.

While Fleck’s work had been ignored for decades, philosophers and epistemologists were now up in arms about Kuhn. By depicting science as operating without steady guidance from a single, rational method, he had – so, it was said, unironically – reduced science to mob psychology. In parallel with these accusations, however, his studies made it possible to conceive new lines of empirical inquiry, coalescing into social constructivism as a major component in science and technology studies (Barnes, 1982).

These developments were viewed quite differently by the involved thought collectives. Social constructivism was very provocative in an English context dominated by logical positivism. But it seemed banal to French epistemologists for whom it had never been in doubt that observations were theory laden. In Anglo-Saxon contexts, Foucault’s pathbreaking studies were seen to align with Kuhn’s historisation of science. ⁵ Hence, they were widely understood as an advanced form of social construction, whereas in France, Foucault was appreciated for his careful epistemological reconstructions of medicine, economics, and pedagogy which made him an obvious inheritor of structuralism (Bowker and Latour, 1987: 726).

Yet the encounters turned out to be generative (despite, or perhaps rather because of, the mutual incomprehension). Among other things, they created openings for poststructuralist elements to slide into the series of science. From one side, Fleck and Kuhn had shown the path to dynamic, empirical studies of science using sociological and historical methods. No abstract, underlying structure was in sight, and evidently it wasn’t missed. From the other side, French philosophers like Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Michel Serres had begun replacing rigid structures with open-ended arrangements and flows. The situation was now rife with variational potential.

While Kuhn and Foucault had focused on discontinuities (scientific revolutions, epistemic ruptures), Latour (1987) became attentive to continuous modifications and micro-translations. His studies of Pasteur have been described as a ‘mock-epic’ (Smith, 2005: 53) update of Fleck’s comparative epistemology. Piggybacking on the radical rethinking of materiality carried out by Deleuze, Guattari, and Serres, the question of nonhuman agency would become central to Actor-Network Theory and feminist technoscience – and, later, to new materialism and the elemental turn.

The tangled trajectories of Fleck and Bachelard into STS and new materialism illustrate that the series of science is made from contingencies and variations. As with dead reckoning, a general sense of direction can be achieved only with the benefit of hindsight. There is no single epistemic rupture with non-science though there are efforts to correct the trajectory along the way. In that respect, the series of science differs markedly from the series of madness.

The Series of Madness

Let us now consider a very different mode of navigation associated with ‘the series of madness’. We do not use madness pejoratively but to frame explorations dealing with the edge of (Western) reason, rationality, and logic; with possibilities that can only be intuited beyond the thresholds of scientific common sense. ⁶ Michel Serres once described madness with reference to Samuel Butler’s country called Erewhon:

In this fanciful land criminals are cared for, the sick are judged, and, often, condemned. It is the hell of innocence. Its name, strangely reversed, signifies, for those who refuse to understand, nowhere. Nowhere, or on the other side of the mountains. (Serres, 2023: 191)

Erewhon is an inversion, it is the real upended. As such, it is dislocated from anywhere in particular and lies at the limits of what is currently known. But that does not make it impossible to apprehend. The inversion of what passes for reason is latent within reason itself, and as such intimate with us, or now-here.

At the beginning of the series of madness, we can place Alfred Jarry, a French playwright and novelist, and the inventor of a speculative practice called ‘Pataphysics (the single apostrophe is a deliberate part of the name). In general, ‘Pataphysics explores the conditions that might underpin other worlds than the one that we happen to inhabit (Hugill, 2012). Thus, it establishes the same kind relation to metaphysics (which examines the conditions of possibility for this world) as the latter does to physics (which examines what this world actually consists of). As the ‘science of imaginary solutions’, ‘Pataphysics examines processes and circumstances that exist in alternative worlds beyond the limits of rational science.

According to the Collège de ‘Pataphysique, founded in 1948 with illustrious members including Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró and the Marx brothers, ‘pataphysical reasoning is entirely useless, since it does not have any application, but it is also the only ‘true science’ for the exact same reason – it is not tainted by utility. Jarry delighted in imagining what would happen by changing some specific parameters of normality in strange ways. His novel The Supermale described a race between a locomotive and a team of bicyclists capable of continuing beyond death, as their bodies are animated by a mysterious source of infinite energy (Jarry, 1999). Elsewhere, he created a blueprint for a time machine that would not operate in accordance with linear ‘clock time’ but rather with the principles of duration explicated by the philosopher Henri Bergson (Jarry, 1965).

The year 1948 also marked the death of Antonin Artaud, another major figure in the series of madness. Artaud, too, was a playwright, novelist, and artist-at-large. Among other things, he envisaged a kind of multi-media performance, originally called the ‘Théâtre Alfred Jarry’ – later changed to the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ – which obsessively explored the limits of meaning by techniques including compulsive repetition, obscenity, howls and grunts, and relentless sensory overload. His ambition was to create a kind of performance sufficiently agitated to make art and lived experience collapse. ⁷

Among Artaud’s final performances was a chaotic sound-collage for radio called Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de Dieu (To Have Done with the Judgment of God). Later, Deleuze placed this piece within a lineage of other logics that escape reason, ‘the logic of masochism, the logic of sense and nonsense in Lewis Carroll, the logic of the schizophrenic process, or the logic of certain philosophers who, under cover of rationality, invent logics that are in fact hardly rational’ (Lapoujade, 2017: 27).

After deportation from Ireland, where he had embarked on a mystical journey to liberate the people, Artaud was incarcerated in various French asylums and subjected to electro-shock therapy. During this period, he began sending ‘spells’ – drawings and texts on partially burnt paper – to friends, public figures, and enemies, including Adolf Hitler (see Rowell, 1996). He would later be hailed by the avantgarde for his experiments with aesthetic extremes.

Even when engaging with science, Artaud never departed from the series of madness. Does science move along a meandering path, as Fleck would have it? No, for Artaud (1976: 361), ‘all forms of experiment conceal reality’. Did Pasteur build a laboratory and raise the world, as in Latour’s ‘mock-epic’? Not according to Artaud: ‘When Pasteur tells us that there is no spontaneous generation and that life cannot emerge from a void, we think that Pasteur was mistaken about the real nature of the void and that a new experiment will show that Pasteur’s void is not a void: and this experiment has been performed’ (p. 361). Artaud did not, unfortunately, lift the veil of this mysterious experiment, but obviously it involved a very unorthodox notion of science.

Those who grapple with madness inevitably face a paradox. You can try to explain irrationality with reason but it is a category mistake, like reading a ‘book of spells for syntax’ (Serres, 2023: 167). Yet, following unreason all the way leads to an impasse of ‘delirium and nonsense’. The paradox is internal to the series of madness, where every ‘journey is a hallucination’, as de Selby (1939: 822) once wrote. Similarly, Serres described Foucault’s studies of madness as an ‘odyssey of alterities’ (2023: 182).

This is an apt image. Just as Odysseus’s journey back to Ithaca was constantly interrupted, the series of madness proceeds by detours, pauses, impasses, stoppages, and near-miraculous escapes. ⁸ Unlike the deliberate attempts at correction characteristic of the series of science, these are wild and unexpected diversions which fling the series into unforeseen directions. In one sense, this inscribes the series of madness with mythical qualities that communicate with the concerns of the classical humanities. But there are also crosscutting relations to the sciences. For like Odysseus, who overcame each new obstacle with a form of technical ingenuity ⁹ – like tying himself to a mast to avoid being lured by sirens – passage along the series of madness also involves inventive prowess. Just think of Jarry’s fascination with bicycles, Artaud’s theatrical lighting, or Deleuze’s passion for cinema.

Thus, both series prolong a continuous movement through variation. The series of science may have its own unthought (contingency and variation) but the series of madness has its peculiar reasons. ‘Lock up madness behind a gate’ if you must, Serres (2023: 185) admonishes, ‘but be aware, in so doing, that you are restricting reason.’ We are far away from risk-free dialogues and sterile combinations. But what kind of passage is possible between the divergent series? How is it possible for any form of transdisciplinarity emerge? To answer this question, we must enter the devil’s interval.

The Devil’s Interval

Reason and unreason exist in a state of co-implication. There is, Deleuze (2004: 175) wrote, ‘profoundly, a nonsense of sense, from which sense itself results’. The closer you look, the more the perspectives seem to oscillate (Strathern, 2002). How can we elaborate this complex situation?

In music theory, the devil’s interval is composed of a tritone (three adjacent whole tones) within an octave. The devil’s interval became a signature chord progression in heavy metal as an unintended consequence of an attempt by Tony Iommi, the guitarist of Black Sabbath, to emulate a sequence from Gustav Holst’s ‘Mars, the Bringer of War’. Its appeal was a characteristically eerie, dissonant and unresolved sound.

Extending the improvisation, we transport the devil’s interval into the ecology of knowledges, where we define it as the eerie, unresolved plane that stretches between the series of science and of madness. Bearing in mind Deleuze’s suggestion that structure involves two divergent series put into a communication by a ‘great mobile element’, we can conceive of the mobile elements as transdisciplinary concepts. Their potential generativity hinges on making dissonance felt in the other series through aberrant movement across the interval. Note how this theory of passage articulates knowledge in variational terms without relying on any fixed dichotomy between science and the humanities. There is no need to put the two into ‘dialogue’. Note, too, that knowledge emerges from navigational principles that are profoundly different from either controlled forward movement or epistemic rupture. ¹⁰

Let us look at some examples. Power was a mobile element for Foucault (1990, 1991, 1994). He observed that modern states are no longer able to justify their use of violence with reference to a divine source (as when Galileo was punished for contradicting the Bible: ‘and yet she moves. . .’). The late 18th century saw the emergence of an entirely different configuration of power and knowledge, where sexual deviance and madness became subject to intense scrutiny. A new set of individual and social norms for mental health and acceptable behaviour was established, and these emerging archetypes of normality were inscribed in regulations and classificatory systems. Over time, governance came to revolve around biopolitical control of populations through taxonomies of diagnosis, adjustment, and treatment. Thus, Foucault’s famous diagnosis of the modern state was a consequence of his turning power into a mobile element that created new angles between the series of science and madness as it traversed the devil’s interval. One of the enduring effects was bringing into plain view the eerie and unresolved basis of modern forms of power.

Power was also a great mobile element for Michel Serres; however, he tilted the devil’s interval towards science. Inspired by biological informatics, Serres (1982) saw power as a form of ‘generalized parasitism’ (Brown, 2002). Power is obtained from a position where valuable information flows can easily be intercepted. Advanced capitalism, for example, no longer needs to control the means of production. Instead, speculative entrepreneurs convert information into transactions a few nanoseconds before their competitors. Similarly, platform capitalism relies on real-time information from mobile apps to extract value from goods and services created by others.

To those allergic to dissonance, there is hardly anything more annoying than the relentless tacking back and forth across the interval. If you tilt towards madness, you will immediately be accused of irrationality and undermining the very possibility of knowledge. But if you tilt towards science, you will soon be denounced as a cold objectivist, without empathy for human suffering and unable to grasp relations of dominance.

It is not without humour that Lacan (2001) was accused of both sins at once. He had inherited Freud’s problem of defining the relation between subjectivity and the unconscious. How to make sense of subjectivity given the paradoxical absence of a conscious ground? After experimenting with a model from structural linguistics, Lacan tilted towards mathematics. He came to view Freud’s version of the psyche as based on an outdated hydraulic model, which might be improved with concepts from topology, set theory or algebra. Yet, to breathe life into his formal schema, Lacan scavenged literature and myth for examples and tilted back towards madness. To perplexed observers, these oscillations seemed like deliberate obscurantism – or worse.

One last mobile element: the subjectile. The philosopher Jacques Derrida’s major claim to fame was deconstruction, which he developed as a unique practice of interpretation. However, he also challenged Lacan’s mathematized concept of subjectivity by tilting the devil’s interval back towards madness. Antonin Artaud was again involved, having invented the term subjectile to describe his own spoiled or ruined artworks. In an essay on Artaud’s paintings, Derrida (1994) now argued that the relation between the subject and its exterior world is better understood on a ‘subjectile’ model, akin to paint ‘thrown’ or ‘spurted’ on a canvas, than according to Lacan’s formalization. This had a clear polemical edge since Lacan had diagnosed Artaud as incurably mad: the ‘subjectiles’ were made while Artaud was locked up in the French asylum system. We suspend judgment about who has the best diagnosis of whom in this complex situation, but it is safe to say that the subjectile created a very agitated movement between the series.

The Trouble with Rocks

Where does this take us with respect to Grand Anthropocene Challenges, the elemental turn, and a transdisciplinary ecology of knowledges? Maniglier (2021: 31, emphasis in original) argues that Gaston Bachelard’s famous epistemological break does not represent a new scientism but a manner doing ‘justice to the qualitative difference between the scientific and non-scientific ways of thinking’. Scientific problematizations, in this reading, ‘fold the entire world onto itself, so that all dimensions of reality now refer to one another, as in a play of echoes’. This is why a ‘problematic’ is always constituted as a variational field. ¹¹

This ‘play of echoes’ is vividly displayed in recent controversies surrounding the dating and meaning of the term ‘Anthropocene’ itself. Since 2009, the Subcommission of Quaternary Stratigraphy has been tasked with considering a proposal to name the Anthropocene as a new epoch in Earth history – following the Holocene, which has so far lasted 11,700 years. The proposal was recently rejected in a final vote clouded by allegations of misconduct and hidden agendas (Barnosky and Hannibal, 2024). The controversy is particularly instructive because it clearly shows the meandering of the Anthropocene itself, as a rubric and problematic that cannot be contained within either nature or culture for long.

Formal acceptance of the Anthropocene demands incontestable evidence of human impact on Earth System processes at a planetary scale. Whilst rock is the medium through which this form of planetary temporality is negotiated (Zalasiewicz et al., 2017), it makes for a surprisingly ambiguous mediator. The question of durability is crucial. Whilst it is possible for sedimentary rock to form relatively quickly in days or weeks, through volcanic lava and landslide deposits, geological time units are typically defined in relation to rocks that have been formed thousands or millions of years ago, rather than in the last 70 years (Turner et al., 2024). In search for Anthropocene markers that would circumvent this problem, geologists have invented new techniques that differentiate strata through chemical patterns and signatures extracted from soil or ice samples and made use of existing data to predict long-term ‘biological fallout’ which may be preserved in geological strata (Zalasiewicz et al., 2019). So far, however, it seems the rocks have been more successful in disorganizing the geologists than the geologists in organizing the rocks.

These technoscientific variations are internal to geology. However, the Anthropocene lives an extremely varied existence beyond scientific collectives. The term has been a lightning rod for controversies about human exceptionalism, planetary inequalities, the legacies of colonialism, and much else (see Zalasiewicz et al., 2024). Over the last decades, a myriad of ‘counter-cenes’ have been proposed in the humanities and social sciences, addressing issues from fossil capitalism to white supremacy (Hallé and Milon, 2020). It is possible, or likely, that the geological controversies would not have been so heated if not for this wider context. Indeed, they might not have happened at all. After all, the Berlin-based cultural institution Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), a major purveyor of public Anthropocene discourse, was essentially the only funder for the Anthropocene Working Group’s effort to gather data for the golden spike. ¹²

The notion that human actions resonate at a planetary scale has a much longer history than the Anthropocene. In first century BCE, Lucretius considered that the world was not made for human use and might not sustain a growing population (Zalasiewicz et al., 2019). Today, the ‘critical zone’ designates the small envelope of the Earth System where humans can live (Latour and Weibel, 2020), their societies laterally distributed across the thin slice of the habitable world. Yet, there are also obscure relations that move vertically up and down (Serres, 2022). Many earthly (and unearthly) beings lie at the edges or somewhere beyond. To communicate with them tends to require some extraordinary mode of transit. To the Romans, thunderstorms were noise from the workshops of the Gods. The wellheads mounted around their water systems were symbolically related to stones marking sacred spots, often where lightning had struck the ground (Serres, 2022). They might act as passages to underworlds or other worlds.

Volcanoes are also fiery and dangerous passageways between the surface and the interior, that pull fascinated onlookers in the direction of both reason and madness. Theirs is not a realm of intermittent tacking but of wild and abrupt arrivals and departures. In Verne’s (1864) fantasy Journey to the Center of the Earth (which turned out to be a chronostratigraphic visit to a still existing Mesozoic era) the explorers descend through the Icelandic volcano Snæfellsjökull and return through the cone of Stromboli, north of Etna in Sicily. The philosopher Empedocles reputedly flung himself into Etna, leaving only a sandal behind, and rumours have it that the disappeared theoretical physicist Etiore Majorana met the same fate (Serres, 2012).

Lovecraft’s (1964 [1931]) ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ does not feature volcanoes, but the other elements are present in abundance. The story concerns an expedition deep into Antarctica, where researchers from Miskatonic University who seek to procure deep rock samples with an amazing new drill encounter dormant eldritch horrors. For most of those involved, things go the way of Empedocles and Majorana. The surviving narrator struggles with how to convince the scientific world that there are monsters ready to consume the world, placing his slim hope in a mixture of hard data and ‘certain primordial and highly baffling myth cycles’. What is displayed here is an absolute ontological divide between scientific rationality and monstrous realities, a bizarre ultra-dualism, which must be bridged but cannot be. In his own way, Lovecraft was resolutely modern.

For those who have never been modern, like the Andean peasants (runakuna) who live with earth beings (tirakuna) that are not mountains (de la Cadena, 2015), modern distinctions between science and myth are hardly relevant. Their worlds and relations make clear that what Westerners can only see and experience as mountains are more and other than mere extrusions of igneous rock pushed through the earth’s mantle to form part of the lithosphere. From the point of view of scientific objectivity, such ideas belong in the realm of unreason and madness. But from the point of view of transdisciplinary instruction, earth-beings might well be activated as great mobile elements with which to reimagine passages between the environmental sciences and indigenous worldings. This would be a prime illustration of the devil’s interval as a theory of transdisciplinary encounter, passage, and transformation. Rather than being permanently stuck in an epistemological break, we would be witness to the emergence of partial relations through unresolved dissonance.

Conclusion

Twenty years ago, Barbara Herrnstein Smith (2005: 46) observed that ‘[T]ruth seems to be in trouble these days [. . .] The concept appears elusive, difficult or perhaps impossible to articulate clearly in relation to other ideas – for example, fact, reality or objectivity – that have also become problematic.’ Then came the Anthropocene. Faced with galloping climate change, denial and political paralysis, and put on the defensive by constant attacks, social sciences and humanities did a salto mortale and declared that it’s time to get real and learn properly from the sciences.

The evidence for the Anthropocene is indeed clear (see Gasparin et al., 2020; Turner et al., 2024; Zalasiewicz et al., 2019). Challenges much grander than we would like to think about ominously await. But how to think of those challenges in terms of our stagnant ecology of knowledges? Current efforts to address the global challenges still work through all the usual epistemic hierarchies, reaffirming the hoary division of knowledge as the ‘two cultures’. The very model of the ‘moonshot’ masks an archaic relation to a profoundly violent pursuit of social order (as seen in the Cold War ‘race to space’), which is currently also reproduced in the passion for space travel by right-wing billionaires (see Brown, 2024).

The elemental turn is more appealing and sophisticated in all dimensions. But important questions are left unanswered. When the elements move into the social sciences and humanities, what goes the other way? This requires serious thinking. If the answer is ‘nothing much’, it might well be that the same old epistemic hierarchy has been dressed up in some new clothes. This will not protect the humanities against getting caught in a vicious cycle where they are only kept alive by keeping the promises made to the STEM masters up-to-date and convincing. We will be no closer to joint transdisciplinary instruction.

Our concern has been with the residual epistemic dualism and conventional knowledge hierarchies (i.e. natural science above everything else) that routinely resurface within urgent calls to climate (and other) forms of action. What good will it do to unite against the Grand Challenges if it makes no difference to the ecologies of knowledges? Why spend all this time and energy to engage the sciences if it does no more than dressing the social sciences and humanities in a slightly different garb? Is it not possible to let our priorities, new modes of thought and different possibilities for acting emerge from somewhere else entirely? By entering the devil’s interval, we have envisioned another model for transdisciplinary instruction.

It is striking that the rhetoric around Grand Challenges – openness, transparency, convergence, integration, transformation – never tries to articulate how invention actually happens. An answer emerges from our exploration of the series of science and madness, and of the devil’s interval. Invention becomes possible when eerie calls, like the sirens luring Odysseus, reverberate across the planes and flash up, as scrambled messages and contingent events, in the series. These great mobile elements produce movements and variations, but never integrations. If ‘all intellectual work is by essence transdisciplinary’, as Maniglier (2021: 38) wrote, and only ever operates ‘in a chain of relays’, it follows that the new new scientific spirit (Serres, 2023; Simons, 2022) must be defined by methods and procedures that allow these mobile elements to freely roam the devil’s interval.