1

Christopher Watkin | chris.watkin@monash.edu | christopherwatkin.com

Michel Serres Today

Abstract.
This is an expanded version of a paper originally given at the English and Theatre Studies research
seminar at Melbourne University in May 2015, and it retains its oral tone. My intention both for the
original paper and for this expanded version is to provide a first introduction to the work and
thought of Michel Serres. I discuss how Serress work has been received in the French-speaking and
English-speaking worlds to date, briefly highlight the different areas in which his thought is making a
decisive contribution today, and then offer reflections on what it is that characterises his writing as a
whole. I finish by examining some of his recent thought in more detail, specifically his recent
elaboration of an econarratology around the idea of the "Great Story" of the universe, opening the
way, for the first time in history, to develop a truly universal humanism.
Introduction
This is the start of a project. I am at the beginning of a journey with Serres and in this talk I want to
share with you some of what drew me to write a book on him and where my research has led me so
far. The first half will be a general introduction to Michel Serress thought, which means that it will
inevitably be a mile wide and an inch deep. In the second half I will focus on a set of questions that
arise in some of Serress recent work on humanism. Think of it as a selection of jelly beans followed
by a steak. I will try to keep the technical philosophical work in the paper to a minimum and show
how Serres can be useful to scholars across the disciplines.

Part A: An Introduction to Michel Serres

Biographical sketch
Michel Serres was born in 1930 in Agen, in the rural Aquitaine region of south-west France. He
entered the Ecole Normale Suprieure, that great finishing school for French philosophers, in the
same year as Jacques Derrida, and the two corresponded during their time at the ENS. In fact, they
went on a skiing holiday together in 1953, during which Derrida met his future wife Marguerite.
Derrida and Serres were two of only four students to take philosophy that year, though Serress
main subject was mathematics. He spent 1956-8 in the French navy, during which time he served in
the operation to reopen the Suez canal and in the Algerian war. From 1958-1968 he took up a
lecturing post at the university of Clermont-Ferrand, where he was a colleague of Foucault at the
time Foucault was working on The Order of Things. During this period he also made a three-part
television series with Alain Badiou in 1967, entitled Model and Structure. In 1968 he moved to the
new experimental university in Vincennes where he was succeeded in 1969 by Gilles Deleuze. He
moved to a post at Paris I (Panthon-Sorbonne) and in 1984 became professor in the Department of
French and Italian at Stanford University. In 1990 he was elected as one of the forty members of the
Acadmie Franaise, the highest honour in French intellectual life. Serres has written over seventy
single-authored books, including two recent best sellers in France: Petite Poucette (translated on
Thumbelina) on our technological culture, which sold over 100 000 copies in its first year, and Temps
des crises (Times of Crisis) on issues relating to the financial crisis of 2008. He continues to publish
today at the rate of just over a book a year. For those interested in his bibliography, there is a
comprehensive list of publications on my website, as well as a timeline of his life and publications.

Reception of Serress work in France and the English-speaking world

To say that Serres has written over seventy books, his reception has been slight up to date. It is a
corpus waiting to be discovered and mined, especially in the English-speaking world. But if we dig
below the surface it turns out that the story of his reception is a little more complicated than that.
Curiously, his work is cited a great deal without Serres himself being in the philosophical limelight.
Here, for example, is a graph, generated from the corpus of google books, of the number of times
Serres and Badiou are mentioned in books in French, published from 1960 to 2008 (the data stops in
2008):

And if we look at books published in English, we get this:

I make no claims for the statistical rigour of these graphs, and the only points I want to make from
them are that 1) since 1960 Serres has been, and continues to be, mentioned by name in more
French publications than his much better known contemporary Alain Badiou, and 2) he has been
much more adequately received in the French speaking world than in the English (by a factor of
roughly 10 to 1 as a percentage of all books published in the language a particular year). Serres
largely remains to be discovered by English readers.

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If we add in some other contemporary French philosophers we get the following trends for Frenchlanguage books
:

And these trends for English language publications:

What is striking in the French graph here is that, until around 2006-2007 Serres was far and away the
most cited French philosopher still living in 2015, at which point he was just pipped by Jacques
Rancire. Over a number of decades he has enjoyed a greater and more sustained citation count
than other living French philosophers in Francophone publications, though again this is not yet
reflected in the English-speaking world.

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One final graph. If we look at Google Trends (i.e. what people are searching for on the web) again we
find an interesting result:

Averaged over the period from 2005 to the present day, internet activity for Michel Serres is higher
than for other living French philosophers; only Badiou comes close.
However, despite these consistently high ratings by comparison with other contemporary French
thinkers, there are only three existing monograph studies of aspects of Serress work (either in
English or in French), four volumes of collected essays including one on Serres and Deleuze, and a
handful of special issues of journals and journal articles. I think it is safe to say that, thus far, Serres
has been somewhat under-received. If he is cited and mentioned so much, why is he not better
known? William Paulson, who has written on Serres, offers one possible explanation:
Serress writing may be called utopian in that it calls on an audience that may not exist in any
place, or that is so dispersed, at any rate, as not to make up one of the identiable groupings
we call cultural communities.1
In other words, the range of subjects and disciplines within which and about which he writes is so
broad that all those with an interest do not gather together as a group of Serresians. Whereas
Serres himself manages to cross disciplinary boundaries, the community of his readers has not
shown itself to be so courageous. A related reason for Serress slight reception is that his thought
covers so great a breadth that it requires any reader to be ready to leave their disciplinary comfort
zone if they are to engage with it.2 It is partly this cross-disciplinarity that draws me to Serres, and I
will talk more about it later.

William Paulson, Michel Serres's Utopia of Language, Configurations 8:2 (2000) 217-8.
This point is made by Pierpaolo Antonello when he argues that Any academic who engages herself with
Serress thought is then required to be a hybrid, to exceed the boundary of any established profession or
discipline, to become an outsider. Pierpaolo Antonello, Celebrating a Master: Michel Serres, Configurations
8:2 (2000) 167.
2

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How is Serres being used today?
The first thing to say here is that Serres is being used more and more. The translation of his books is
really taking off now, with Bloomsbury in particular making more and more of his work available in
English. There are a number of reasons why Serress work is being translated at an increasing pace
now, and a number of reasons for thinking that his time has now come. I will point to four
contemporary debates that are currently drawing heavily on Serress writing.
Posthumanism
A translation of Serress The Parasite was the inaugural volume in the Minnesota University Press
Posthumanities book series, which billed it as The foundational work in the area now known as
posthuman thought. In The Parasite Serres argues that human relations are not to be figured in the
first instance in terms of mutual exchange but of parasitism. Every relational structure, whether
human or non-human, Is parasitical. To suggest that the human is parasitical upon the non-human
world strikes a decisive blow to the human non/human dichotomy, reframing the human not as the
master and possessor of nature, nor as the Cartesian or phenomenological origin of the world, but as
a second thought:
And that is the meaning of the prefix para- in the word parasite: it is on the side, next to,
shifted; it is not on the thing, but on its relation. It has relations, as they say, and makes a
system of them. It is always mediate and never immediate.3

Ecology and the environmental humanities

Serres is also at the forefront of the growing interest in ecophilosophy or the environmental
humanities, largely through his 1991 book The Natural Contract. In this important book he insists
that we cannot ignore that human interests and the interests of the planet are more intricately
intertwined than ever, and that we cannot hope adequately to address the problems that face us
today if we consider them if we consider them first and foremost as human issues. How can we hope
to address climate change, for example, if we remain within an anthropocentric frame? We must
find a way of taking all interestshuman and non-humaninto account, and Serress natural
contract is a proposal to achieve this aim. Just as the social contract is an ideal framework for the
regulation of human society in which all its members agree to certain norms of respect and
behaviour, so the natural contract extends this regulatory ideal to make it adequate to the problems
and issues that face us today, many of which surpass the merely human or cultural world. To the
objection that the worlds oceans or forests cannot meaningfully enter into any agreement, Serres
asks the objector to show him the original signatures on the social contract. The nature of the issues
we face today means that we must give the non-human its place at the table.

New materialisms and object-oriented thought

Serres is also foundational reference for the emerging trends of new materialism and object
oriented philosophy, partly in his own name and partly through the formative influence he has had
on the thought of Bruno Latour.4 Serres insists on a break with the linguistic philosophy of the late
3

Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis, MN: University Of Minnesota Press,
2007) 38-9.
4
See in particular Michel Serres and Bruno Latour. Conversations on Culture, Science and Time, trans. Roxanne
Lapidus (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

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twentieth century, decrying any theory that is empty of objects and deals only in words.5 A keen
mountaineer and ex sailor, Michel Serress own sensibility for the natural world runs through his
writing; his own philosophy has with the wind in its hair and soil under its finger-nails.
He has exerted a particular influence on object-oriented thought through his refusal of the Cartesian
subject-object dichotomy and his account of what he calls the quasi-object. One of Serress own
examples of a quasi-object is the ball in a soccer game. Neither simply natural nor entirely cultural,
the ball circulates among the players in a way that makes possible a certain set of social relations. It
is misses something important, Serres argues, to characterise the ball as an inert object at the whim
of the human subjects in the situation; it shapes and opens possibilities for their actions just as they
do for its actions. Other examples of quasi-objects would be the smoking pipe passed from hand to
hand and lip to lip, or the coin or note that circulates to facilitate economic relations, or words
themselves, without the circulation of which human relations as we know them would be
unthinkable.6
Cross-disciplinarity
Finally in this brief survey of ways in which Serress thought is being used today (though there are
other areas of influence I have no time to mention today), he is influential through the way his work
is genuinely cross-disciplinary and bridges the arts, humanities, social sciences and hard sciences.
Serres, as I said, was trained as a mathematician and in one interview identifies his discipline as
history of science. Unlike some would-be cross-disciplinary thinkers, he has earned his hard scientific
chops. But Serres offers us no quick and easy interdisciplinary gesture or a casual nod in its direction.
Throughout his career he shows a deep commitment to genuinely cross-disciplinary study.
One image that Serres uses to describe the difficulty of cross-disciplinary study comes from his own
naval past and his passion for navigation. It is the North-West passage, that complex course from the
Atlantic to the Pacific between Greenland and Canada. It is a true connection, but it is not a linear or
straightforward one.

Michel Serres, Panoptic Theory, in Thomas M. Kavanagh (ed.), The Limits of Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1989) 28-9.
6
Michel Serres, Rameaux (Paris: Editions le Pommier, 2004) 158.

It is in terms of this local, painstaking navigation that Serres works through what it means to engage
in cross-disciplinary study. Crossing the borders between academic disciplines cannot be simple, offthe-shelf or linear. This only leads to selling out one discipline to the assumptions or the methods of
another, which is what all too often passes for interdisciplinary study today. For Serres, by contrast,
cross-disciplinary work must be a careful, labyrinthine and bespoke navigation of the local, complex
and unique relations between different fields:
The passage is rare and narrow [] From the sciences of man to the exact sciences, or
inversely, the path does not cross a homogeneous and empty space. Usually the passage is
closed, either by land masses or by ice floes, or perhaps by the fact that one becomes lost.
And if the passage is open, it follows a path that is difficult to gauge.7
And
Passages exist, I know, I have drawn some of them in certain works using certain operators
[]. But I cannot generalize, obstructions are manifest and counter-examples
abound.8
One quick example of the sort of cross-disciplinary insights Serres seeks to bring to bear in his
writing is his discussions of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century in the wake of Sadi Carnots
discovery of the principles that would later be formalised as the second law of thermodynamics and
entropy. Every metaphysics needs its physics, Serres argues, and we can see the principles of
thermodynamics through the whole of nineteenth century culture:
Read Carnot starting on page one. Now read Marx, Freud, Zola, Michelet, Nietzsche, Bergson,
and so on. The reservoir is actually spoken of everywhere, or if not the reservoir, its
equivalent. But it accompanies this equivalent with great regularity. The great encyclopaedia
and the library, the earth and primitive fecundity, capital and accumulation, concentration in
general, the sea, the prebiotic Soup, the legacies of heredity, the relatively closed
topography in which instincts, the id, and the unconscious are brought together. Each
particular theoretical motor forms its reservoir, names it, and fills it with what a motor needs.
I had an artefact, a constructed object: the motor. Carnot calls it the universal motor. I could
not find a word, here it is: reservoir. [] Question : in the last century, who did not reinvent
the reservoir?9
Serres sees a similar pattern in the twentieth century with information theory and code: the
unconscious is structured like a language, the secret of life is found in the genetic code, and
structuralism and post-structuralism both employ an encode-decode model of language, also taking
on information theorys ideas of noise, indeterminacy and interference.10 As Ren Girard says of
Serres, criticism is a generalized physics.11
7

Serres, Herms V, 18. Quoted on Harari and Bell, Journal plusieurs voies xi.
Serres, Herms V, 23-4. Quoted on Harari and Bell, Journal plusieurs voies xiii.
9
Michel Serres, La Distribution: Herms IV (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977) 60-1. Quoted in English translation
at Josu v. Harari and David F. Bell, Journal plusieurs voies, inMichel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science,
Philosophy (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) xix.
10
Harari and Bell, Journal plusieurs voies xxiii.
11
Serres's major interest is the parallel development of scientific, philosophical, and literary trends. In a very
simplified manner, one might say that Serres always runs counter to the prevalent notion of the two cultures scientific and humanistic-between which no communication is possible. In Serres's view 'criticism is a
generalized physics,' and whether knowledge is written in philosophical, literary, or scientific language it
8

What are the general characteristics of Serress thought?

So those are some of the main ways in which Serres is being deployed today in contemporary
debates. My next question is: how are we to characterise his thought? What is its overall shape;
what are its characteristic moves? It is a difficult question because 1) he eschews the predictability
of repeating the same moves and 2) shape and space are themselves important themes in his
thought. Nevertheless, I think there is something useful that can be said in this regard.
1) An encyclopedic method
Grant me for a moment that we might understand philosophy in general, and the history of French
philosophy in the last century in particular, as a series of attempts to come to terms with the relation
between system and singularity.12 Let us think of these attempts in terms of two broad tendencies,
which I shall call system philosophies and singularity philosophies. System philosophies seek to
bring apparently diverse phenomena, objects or ideas under general explanatory concepts, finding
the unity hidden behind seeming multiplicity. Where seeming exceptions to such systematisation
exist they need to be explained away or incorporated into the system. Examples of this tendency
might be Parmenides, the Scholastics, Descartes, Hegel and Sartre: fitting all facts and all
phenomena into a comprehensive and overarching matrix and set of categories. The caricature of
this philosophy is that it is a top-down imposition: it flies at an altitude of 30 000 feet and shoehorns individual facts and phenomena into a universal matrix that emerges at such a level of
abstraction. This sort of thinking will often seek the universal or the general principle. It is a
philosophy of the same.
On the other hand we have singularity philosophies, which refuse systematisation and denounce
over-arching concepts, rejecting the idea that behind apparent diversity lurks a more fundamental
unity. These philosophies insist upon singularity and uniqueness: at their most acute, they claim that
everything is always already an exception to every universal rule or category to which we might wish
to assign it, and to insist on such rules is a violent imposition akin to racial stereotyping. We might
think perhaps of Heraclitus, Pascal, Kierkegaard or the Nietzsche who said I mistrust all
systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.13 This singularity philosophy
emphasises the individuality, the contrariness, the unclassifiable recalcitrance of things. It is not a
philosophy of the same but a philosophy of difference, and its rallying cry could be Derridas
insistence that every other is altogether other.14
It is interesting to note that these two extremes also account for the factors that lead to
philosophical celebrity, for each of them embodies one of the traits that tend to draw a crowd of
acolytes round a particular philosopher and make a name for them. On the one hand, system
philosophers draw a following by offering a powerful explanatory matrix able to account for what
otherwise would be a bewilderingly disparate and confusion melee of phenomena, events and facts.
Put somewhat crudely, you always have something clever to say about the evening news because
you can explain it and indeed you can explain everything in terms of the system offered to you by
your favourite system philosopher or philosophers: well, of course, whats really going on behind in
nevertheless articulates a common set of problems that transcends academic disciplines and artificial
boundaries. Harari and Bell, Journal plusieurs voies xi.
12
Not the many and the one or the singular and the universal.
13
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings, ed. by Aaron
Ridley, Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 159.
14
This phrase recurs a number of times in Derridas writing. See for example Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi,
trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) 126.

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these events is such and such, but of course most people just dont realise that. How nave! Good
job we know better. On the other hand, singularity philosophers build up an enthusiastic following
by out-critiquing those who went before them, by out-suspecting all previous suspicion, exposing all
previous critical philosophies as incomplete or flawed and thereby proclaiming themselves more
sceptical than thou, until, inevitably, the philosophy in question is in turn knifed in the back by its
successor: The previous generation thought they were being anti-metaphysical, but what they
failed to take into account of course was such and such, which made them by all accounts the last
metaphysicians. How nave! Good job we know better.
Where does Serres sit in relation to philosophies of system and philosophies of singularity? In truth,
he has no interest either in elaborating the system which will yield the truth of everything where
before there has been only ideology and confusion, nor in being more critical and sensitive to
difference than those who have gone before him. That is perhaps one reason why there is no
Serresian school in philosophy full of little Serresians knowingly spouting the soundbites of their
master. I think it is a healthy feature of his reception, and long may it continue.
For his own part, Serres charts a middle course between the Scylla of systematisation and the
Charybdis of exceptionalism, a course he sums up with the motif of the encyclopedia. First, an
encyclopedia ranges over the full extent of human and nonhuman existence, taking in all disciplines.
In the same way, Serress thought has the ambition of stopping at every port, visiting every city. In
one interview he insists that A philosopher does everything, otherwise he does nothing.15 Secondly,
in ranging over everything an encyclopedia does not pretend to exhaust anything, or to give a
complete account of any subject it treats. Thirdly, an encyclopedia is not a system. It does not
impose a matrix of interpretation from above, but each article approaches its subject in its own
terms, often by different authors. It brings subjects together not through top-down fiat but in a
bottom-up way, drawing local links and cross-references between ideas. It does not impose
categories from outside but traces isomorphisms and equivalences from within.16
An encyclopedia is adequately characterised neither as a system nor as a generalised exception to
systematisation. In Serress own words:
Philosophy has the job of federating, of bringing things together. So analysis might be
valuable, with its clarity, rigour, precision and so on, but philosophy really has the opposite
function, a federating and synthesizing function. I think that the foundation of philosophy is
the encyclopaedic, and its goal is synthesis.17
Or again, it is the philosophers job to attempt to see on a large scale, to be in full possession of a
multiple, and sometimes connected intellection.18 In short, Serress encyclopedic approach is a way
of seeking connections not from the air but by sea. Or again, Serres characterises his own work as an
eighteenth century salon, bringing the disciplines together in a conversation that respects the

15

Michel Serres and Marie-Claude Martin, "Entretien: Un philosophe fait tout, sinon il ne fait rien ." Le
Temps, 9 April 2011. http://www.letemps.ch/Page/Uuid/599bd724-6220-11e0-9818ce393cc5d9d9/Michel_Serres_Un_philosophe_fait_tout_sinon_il_ne_fait_rien. Last accessed April 2015.
16
This point is made on Harari and Bell, Journal plusieurs voies xxxvi.
17
Michel Serres and Raoul Mortley. Chapter III. Michel Serres, In French Philosophers in Conversation
(ePublications@bond, 1991) 53. http://epublications.bond.edu.au/french_philosophers/4/. Last accessed May
2015.
18
Michel Serres, Herms V: le Passage du Nord-ouest (Paris : Editions de Minuit, 1980) 24. Quoted on Harari
and Bell, Journal plusieurs voies 13.

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integrity of each, not like a modern university, dividing them and often making them compete with
each other.19 Or, in one final image:
What I seek to form, to compose, to promote I cant quite find the right word is
a synthse, a confluence not a system, a mobile confluence of fluxes. Turbulences,
overlapping cyclones and anticyclones, like on the weather map. Wisps of hay tied in knots.
An assembly of relations. Clouds of angels passing.20

2) The decline of the paradigm of consumption and the rise of the paradigm of
communication
The second way in which I would like to characterise Serress thought today is that he rejects the
prevalent paradigm of production and consumption in favour of the paradigm of communication.
We might think of this as the great wager of his thought. Back in the 1950s he wagered that
structuralism and all the philosophy that would come in its wake went down a wrong track when it
reasoned in terms of a paradigm of production and consumption inherited from Marx:
at the end of the war, Marxism held great sway in France, and in Europe. And Marxism
taught that the essential, the fundamental infrastructure was the economy and production: I
myself thought, from 1955 or 1960 onwards, that production was not important in our
society, or that it was becoming much less so, but that what was important was
communication, and that we were reaching a culture, or society, in which communication
would hold precedence over production.21
What does Serres mean when he says that production was becoming less important? He is drawing
attention to what he calls the greatest revolution in human society since Neolithic times. Ever since
the beginning of the Neolithic around 10 000 BC when humanity settled down and started planting
crops, we have been in a culture most of whose members are involved in the production and
consumption of primary goods, mainly foodstuffs. In Switzerland, Germany, France and Italy in the
year 1900, 70% of the population worked the land. In the last century, however, that age-old pattern
has seen a dramatic change. Today, in the same countries, less than 1% of all workers are involved in
agriculture. For Serres, that is the greatest change that we have seen to human society in the last ten
millennia, greater than the Renaissance, and greater than the two World Wars.22
Most of us today do not work in the production of primary materials; we circulate information.
Furthermore, this circulation of information works according to a fundamentally different paradigm
from that of production and consumption. Think of it this way (to use an illustration Serres sketches
in one of his radio broadcasts): If you grow and harvest wheat and bake bread, and if I pay you five
dollars for the loaf you have baked, then you have five dollars and no loaf, and I have a loaf but have
lost five dollars. An exchange has taken place, on the basis of a process of production, and you and I
find ourselves in a relationship of production, consumption and exchange. But that is not how it
works with information. When I give a lecture on a French film or a French philosopher I do not have
to forget that information in order for my students to remember it. It is not an exchange but a
propagation. It is not a zero sum game. Of course it may be couched within the framework of
mechanisms of exchangethe university takes money off the students and gives some of it to me
19

Serres and Mortley, Chapter III. Michel Serres 59.

Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Culture, Science and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann
Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995) 122.
21
Serres and Mortley, Chapter III. Michel Serres 51.
22
The figures are quoted in Serres and Martin, "Entretien: Un philosophe fait tout, sinon il ne fait rien ".
20

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but that exchange is extrinsic to the propagation of information in the lecture, it is not essential to
the nature of communication itself. In their essence, production/exchange and
communication/propagation function very differently.
Back in the 1960s Serres wagered that our Western, industrialised society would increasingly be
characterised by the propagation of information, not by the exchange of goods. Surely he was right:
We have seen a rapid decline in primary industry in the West, of which my own childhood serves as
a poignant example. When I was little, at the end of the road where I grew up was the huge Manvers
colliery and coking plant. I have only vague memories of the winding towers and chimneys now, but
my parents tell me that on some days the wind would blow the smoke and soot up the hill from the
coking plant to our house and washing hanging out on the line would gather little black specks. Here
is a picture of the Manvers complex from 1980:

The coking plant was closed in 1981, and the colliery in 1988. What stands on the site now is, in part,
a complex of call centres:

The same story was repeated all over the coal mining areas of the north of England. The Sheffield
steel industry similarly shrank to a small-scale high-end premium operation, while the same period
saw the dramatic rise of communication and data processing technology from fixed to mobile
phones and computers, for which the paradigm of production is no longer adequate. It is a trend

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that the complex of technologies we call the internet has only accelerated, and which is vividly
exemplified in the loosing battles currently being fought by corporations over DRM and the free
spread of information. The wager that Serres made in the 1950s is currently being vindicated along
the fibres of the internet.
For Serres, Marxism and the philosophies that rely on its insights cannot account for this new reality
of our society, because they still assume a paradigm of production and exchange whereas in fact
more and more areas of society operate according to a paradigm of communication. It is not that
production, consumption and exchange are going to die outof course notbut that they no longer
adequately describe how our society works.
That brings to a close the jelly bean part of this talk, seeking to range over Serress significance and
give a thumbnail sketch of some overall shapes of his thinking. For the rest of my time I want to
descend to ground level and look more carefully at one aspect of his ecological thinking.

Part B: Serress Econarratology

In a series of four recent books on humanity and humanism,23 Serres makes a threefold claim:

now, for the first time in history, we can elaborate a truly universal humanism
we can do this by telling the story of humanity as part of a larger narrative of the universe
this larger narrative is told not by human beings about the universe but told by the universe
about itself

Lets begin with the first claim: a truly universal humanism. For the first time in history, he argues,
we now have the opportunity to do justice to the universality of the term humanism
because for the first time in the millennial process of hominization we have the scientific,
technical and cognitive means [] to give it a federating and non-exclusive content worthy
of its name.24
What he has in mind here is that palaeoanthropology has unearthed partial skeletons, older than
any recorded and culturally-specific history, of our earliest human ancestors, the Lucys 25
of the east African savannah whose descendants would spread throughout the globe. These
discoveries give us a way to trace back the thread of time to a moment before the birth of
recorded history and before the emergence of distinctive cultures within that history:
Our wisdom now places Lucy before Pliny the Elder, the bones scattered in the valleys of
Chad before Blind Homer and Noah the vine-dresser, and our African Mother and Father
before Adam and Eve, before all ancestors venerated in all cultures; it reads the genetic code
before the code of Hammurabi. Here it is a question of humanity, and not some evil offwhite noise-box [bavard et mchant blanchtre] despising the scarlet barbarian26

23

Michel Serres, Hominescence (Paris: Editions Le Pommier, 2001); L'Incandescent (Paris: Editions le Pommier,
2003); Rameaux (Paris: Editions le Pommier, 2004); Rcits d'humanisme (Paris: Editions le Pommier, 2006).
24
Serres, Hominescence 171-2. All translations of French texts as yet unpublished in English are the authors.
25
Lucy is the name given to the partial skeleton (about 40% complete) of a 3.2 million year old
australopithecus afarensis discovered in Ethiopia by palaeontologist Donald C. Johanson in 1974. Until 2009,
Lucy was the oldest substantial human ancestor skeleton yet discovered.
26
Serres, L'Incandescent 196.

13
This early record of humanity, he claims, is written in the encyclopaedic language of all the
sciences and [] can be translated into each vernacular language, without partiality or
imperialism. 27 A truly universal humanism must begin with this pre-historic moment.
The second claim is that this story of humanity is part of a larger narrative of the universe,
which Serres calls the Great Story (le Grand Rcit). The structure of this story is an extension
of Serress earlier work in biosemiotics. In The Birth of Physics he argues, in informationtheoretical terms, that meaning emerges as an aleatory, local deviation in the window between
two modes of chaos: monotony and white noise.28 In the same way, in his later work he understands
narrative in terms of the interplay between two elements: a relatively constant line (which in
Rameaux he calls the format) and unexpected deviations in that line which he pictures as the kinks
and twists of a branch. Like the information-carrying signal that sits on the spectrum between the
chaos of monotony and the chaos of white noise, so also the growth of a story takes place under a
double tension: the necessity of using pre-established forms in order to communicate in a way that
can be understood, and an obligation to rupture, deviate from and remake these forms because
simply repeating them would hold no message at all.29 It is in the tension between format and
variation that stories emerge, tracing a continuity, branch-like, through haphazard, contingent and
chaotic points.30 Like a growing branch, a developing story need have no final end point,
predetermined or otherwise (we are a long way with Serres from the Aristotelian mythos, and also
from any deconstructive weak messianism) , and though its eventual form may seem to have a
certain retrospectively apprehended teleological balance, its growth is a series of contingencies. We
must, Serres insists, quell the prophetic instinct to project the end of the story from its beginning as
if a single intention held together its disparate parts, and instead force ourselves to think a
repetition or rule without finality and without anthropomorphism.31
The Great Story is told by Serres retrospectively as a series of four major and contingent bifurcations
in the branch that leads to human beings, four events each more ancient than the last. The first
event already takes us back millions of years to the appearance on the planet of homo sapiens. The
second event is the emergence of life on earth, from the first RNA with the capability to duplicate
itself, through the three billion years when bacteria were the dominant life-form, to the explosion of
multi-cellular organisms recorded in the Burgess shale and the huge proliferation of orders, families,
genera and species. The third takes us back from biology to astrophysics and to the first formation of
material bodies in an infant universe. When it reaches a certain temperature the ionisation that
prevented certain particles forming nuclei ceases, and matter begins to become concentrated into
galaxies separated by a quasi-void.32 Finally, the fourth and most distant event is the birth of the
universe itself, the origin of origins.
Properly speaking, these different stages in the story do not form a succession, as if each needed to
stop for the next to begin. The universe is still cooling; the earth is still developing and new planets
forming; life on earth, and quite possibly elsewhere, is still diversifying and proliferating, and human
beings are still evolving. It is better not to think of a succession of chapters (and this is where Serres
image of the branch is potentially misleading) but one story told by four voices in counterpoint, each
successively joining the collective narrative at a specific moment. What unites these four voices for
Serres is the idea of nature, understood etymologically as that which is born, that which marks a
27

Serres, LIncandescent 32.

Michel Serres, La Naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrce: fleuves et turbulences (Paris: Editions de
Minuit, 1977) 181/The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000) 146.
29
Serres, Rcits dhumanisme 154.
30
Serres, Rcits dhumanisme 153.
31
Serres, Rcits dhumanisme 188.
32
Serres, Rameaux 115.
28

14
temporal distinction, a before and an after. Nature is a story of new-born events, contingent and
unpredictable.33
In passing, I want to draw two important consequences from Serress account of humanity as part of
the Great Story. First, in Serress account humanity derives its identity from its place in the universal
narrative, not from any biological or psychological capacity that may or may not mark the difference
between the human and the non-human, such as intelligence, rationality, language use or
bipedalism. This allows Serres account refreshingly to avoid the interminable and often dangerous
debates around what faculty or capacity might or might not make human beings unique, along with
the liminal cases thrown up by such an approach: the senile, the neonate, and those with severe
mental or physical disabilities. Whereas such an account of humanity based on supposedly
distinctive human capacities advances by drawing more or less unsubstantiated divisions and
erecting castles of hierarchy on the shifting sands of our current biological and psychological
understanding, Serres narrative approach identifies the human by drawing it ever further into a
story it shares with the rest of the universe, not in the first instance by arguing for its uniqueness.
The second consequence I want to draw here from Serress understanding humanity in terms of the
Great Story is that it gives us a new understanding of culture. In an interview with Pierre Lna in the
Cahier de lHerne dedicated to his work, Serres draws two immediate consequences from
understanding humanity in terms of the Great Story. First, it gives us a new sense of culture.
Traditionally, a person would be thought cultured if they had some working knowledge of four
thousand years of history, beginning either in Greece or Mesopotamia; when someone discovers
fifteen billion years behind him he must change his thinking completely or, to translate Serres
literally, he no longer has the same head.34 This idea that humanity, when considered as part of
the Great Story, no longer has the same head is true literally as well as figuratively. Serres repeats
often that different areas of the human brain evolved at different times: the neo-mammalian
neocortex, the paleo-mammalian limbic system and the reptilian basal ganglia.35 This brings along
with it a shift in the notion of narrative itself. What used to be the beginning of history (usually
thought to be coeval with the invention of written communication some four thousand years ago) is
now shown to be the briefest of episodes arriving at the end of a much more ample narrative which,
Serres claims, is recounted by the universe itself.
This brings us to the third of Serress three claims: the universe is not ventriloquized by humanity but
it tells its own story. There is for Serres no imperialist, anthropocentric or animist imposition of
human meaning-making and story-telling on the recalcitrant, indifferent or meaningless flux of life,
no torturing of a helpless nature on the rack of merciless syntax. The universe, the earth and life
know quite well how to tell the story of their own origin and evolution, and when I write I share in
and draw upon the same resources.36 We see here a marked difference from Badiou, Meillassoux
and Malabou, all of whom (Meillassoux and Malabou explicitly) hold that the universe is indifferent
to human concerns and that to ascribe to it human categories of meaning is an anthropocentric
error. Serress position here in fact cuts against the grain of the great majority of the linguistic
philosophy that held sway in the generation previous to Meillassoux, Badiou and Malabou, and
against the grain of most modern thinking since Descartes. For Serres there is no substance dualism,
no Camusian absurd, no Kantian noumenon, and as far as Serres is concerned it is no more
33

Serres, Rameaux 115-6.

Michel Serres and Pierre Lna, Sciences et philosophie (entretien), In Franois L'Yvonnet and Christiane
Frmont (eds.), Cahier de l'Herne Michel Serres, (Paris: ditions de lHerne, 2010) 55.
35
See Pascal Picq, Michel Serres and Jean-Didier Vincent, Qu'est-ce que l'homme? (Paris: Les Editions du
Pommier, 1999) 90; Peter Hallward and Michel Serres, The Science of Relations: An Interview, Angelaki:
Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 8:2 (2003): 233; Serres, LIncandescent 23.
36
Serres, Rcits dhumanisme 80.
34

15
anthropocentric to claim that the universe is meaningful than it is to claim that Romeo and Juliet is
meaningful: they both participate in the same universal dynamic of growth and deviation. For Serres
there is no such thing as brute, indifferent matter. The world tells its own story and all we need do is
find the ears to hear it. As Steven Connor puts it, coding, information, writing, goes all the way
down, and all the way back.37
It could be objected that claiming the world tells its own story is more cosmetic than substantial,
because however far the Story may stretch back in time it still needs to be told through human
investigation and in human language, and is still therefore a story told by humans and for humans
which happens to ventriloquize the non-human. However, this objection assumes that human
language emerges ex nihilo in the Great Story, which is precisely what Serres contests. In the same
way that, in The Birth of Physics, Genesis and The Parasite he insists that semiotics are natural, so
also in his elaboration of the Great Story he argues that narrative is an inherent feature of the
natural universe, of the universe of natal events. There is no qualitative difference between the
story of evolution and the story of the Odyssey: they both enact, each in their own mode, the
processing, ordering and communication of information in an interplay between format and
deviation.38
Serres had previously made the argument that all life (and beyond: Serres includes crystals) receives,
processes, stores and emits information: nothing distinguishes me ontologically from a crystal, a
plant, an animal, or the order of the world.39 In the four books exploring the humanism of the Great
Story he merely expands this biosemiotic analysis to encompass his new econarratology, describing
this expansion with an image from aeronautics:
A four-stage rocket launches the birth of language, the emergence of the ego and the dawn
of narrative which, in telling their story, forms and creates them but forgets their origin: first
it bursts forth from heat towards white noise; from this brouhaha to the first signals; then
from these to feeble melodies; finally from these to the first vowels Noise, call, song, music
voice come before the basic form of enunciation, before the language of story.40
The world does not mutely wait for the advent of humanity in order to tell its story; things speak for
themselves, write by themselves and write about themselves, performatively speaking their
autobiography, or autoecography: The universe, the Earth and life know how to tell the story of
their origin, of their evolution, the contingent bifurcations of their development and sometimes let
us glimpse the time of their disappearance. An immense story emanates from the world.41
We get close to the heart of the matter, I believe, if realise that Serress metaphors are in fact
synecdoches: he is not speaking of one thing in terms of a second, ostensibly unrelated thing but
speaking of a whole in terms of one of its parts. One of Serres characteristic moves, and we see it
here in his defence of metaphorical language, is to invert the order of our thinking so that elements
we previously considered to be in a horizontal, metaphorical relation are in fact seen to be nested in
a synecdoche. In the example we are presently considering, if we object that the rhythms of nature
cannot properly be classed as a story in anything other than an anthropomorphising metaphor,
Serres might reply that, rather than trying and failing to force the rhythms and events of the world
37

Steven Connor, Michel Serres: The Hard and the Soft, A Paper Given at The Centre for Modern Studies,
University of York 26 November 2009, 22. http://stevenconnor.com/hardsoft/hardsoft.pdf.
38
Serres, Rameaux 178.
39
Michel Serres, La Distribution: Herms IV (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977) 271/Hermes: Literature, Science,
Philosophy 83.
40
Serres, Rcits dhumanisme 49-50.
41
Serres, Rcits dhumanisme 80.

16
into a mode of storytelling modelled on human syntactic prose (which would merely constrain them
to become an ungainly extension of Aristotelian narrative) we should rather realise that the varieties
of human storytelling are themselves already one local expression of a broader phenomenon which
they neither exhaust nor inaugurate:
Must I find stories or confessions in the inertia of the living? When I write my own stories
and confessions, do I realise that, as a fractal fragment of the universe, I am imitating
galaxies, the planet, masses of molecules, radioactive particles, the bellowing of a dear or
the vain unfurling of a peacocks plumage?42
In other words, the idea that nature tells its own story is not an unwarranted metaphor; on the
contrary, storytelling understood as a human cultural practice is already a synecdochic expression
of a much more widespread natural phenomenon. When I write, I write like the light, like a crystal or
like a stream; I tell my story like the world. A frequently cited phrase from Serres The Birth of
Physics has until now always been translated as History is a physics and not the other way round.
Language is first in the body.43 However, this translation collapses the multivalence of the French
histoire, and the sentence could equally run Story is a physics. In fact, both senses of histoire
are at play in Serres discussion of negentropy in The Birth of Physics.
The change of paradigm from the metaphorical to the synecdochic is also a challenge to
anthropocentrism. To see eco-narratives as a metaphorical extension of human storytelling is to
assume that human storytelling as the non-metaphorical yardstick by which all other putative
narratives must be measured. But to see human storytelling as a synecdoche of a much broader
phenomenon is, as Serres remarks, to decentre narrative with relation to the human at the moment
when nature wrests from us our claim to an exclusivity of language use.44
In conclusion, Serres econarratology allows us to think the universe not simply as a blank canvas for
the quintessentially human practice of storytelling, but as the narrator of its own story. This means
that, just as narrative identity allows us to think human identity beyond the possession of
determinate capacities (like language or rationality) and beyond the limit of the human and the nonhuman, so also Serress ecological narrative identity frees us from having (falsely) to identify the
universe as an inert and passive collection objects inviting human manipulation and exploitation,
and a blank canvas waiting to be daubed with our ex nihilo human meanings.
This paradigm shift has the power to enrich the dialogue between the arts and the sciences at a
moment when the global issues that face us are increasingly irreducible to the human scale, and to
expand the study of narrative identity beyond its customary anthropocentric limits. In his insistence
upon the Great Story of the universe, I would argue that Serres has indeed presented the study of
humanity across the human and natural sciences with a valuable tool and a productive way of
thinking.

42

Serres, Rcits dhumanisme 80.

Serres, La Naissance de la physique 186/The Birth of Physics 150.
44
Serres, Rcits dhumanisme 80.
43