Here are some pictures of the stunningly beautiful city and university of Utrecht, where the Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy (SEP-FEP) conference is currently being held.
Tomorrow I am to give a paper entitled ‘Michel Serres’ “Great Story”: From Biosemiotics to Econarratology’.
Here is the abstract:
From the five volumes of his Hermès series (1968-1980) and through to The Natural Contract in (French original published in 1990), Michel Serres has argued that the origins of human language are rooted firmly in the rhythms and calls of the natural world, that information theory is derivative of fluid mechanics, and that all life is alike in receiving, processing, storing and emitting information. For Serres, ‘nothing distinguishes me ontologically from a crystal, a plant, an animal, or the order of the world’. This radical lifting of the qualitative barrier between human language and channels of information processing in what was previously called the ‘natural’ world underpins a new account of the human, an account which reveals the dichotomy of nature and culture to be a secondary distinction between many interweaving and ultimately inextricable modes of information processing that differ only in their relative scale.
This detailed and longstanding work in biosemiotics helps provide a powerful theoretical platform for Serres’ more recent project, pursued over the course of four seminal but as yet untranslated texts from 2001-2009 (L’Hominescence, 2001; L’Incandescent, 2005; Rameaux; 2007; Récits d’humanisme, 2009), in which he elaborates a new narrative account of the universe and the place of humanity within it, a narrative which he calls the ‘Great Story’ (‘Grand Récit’). Serres’ econarrative throws down a challenge to develop new ways of thinking beyond the dichotomy ‘nature and culture’ with its attendant notion of a qualitative divide between the human and non-human worlds, exposing the dichotomy as increasingly threadbare and arguing for a new humanism that knows nothing of a qualitative opposition between the natural and the cultural. Serres notes that, at the time when it was still admissible to discuss nature and culture separately, a person might be thought cultured if they had some working knowledge of four thousand years of history, beginning either in Greece or Mesopotamia. With the Great Story we now have fifteen billion years behind us and that, Serres maintains, must change a person’s thinking completely or, to translate him literally, a person who understands her place in the Great Story ‘no longer has the same head’.
In this paper I argue for the importance of Serres’ Great Story in staking out the incipient field of econarratology, a field in which ‘nature’ is not ventriloquized in human language but can, in a non-metaphorical way, tell its own story. I also use Paul Ricœur’s account of narrative identity to expose, and offer a remedy for, a potentially problematic internal inconsistency in Serres’ econarrative, an engagement which opens the way, in return to extend the powerful tool of narrative identity beyond its anthropocentric straitjacket. Serres’ econarrative of the Great Story is not only a timely challenge our assumptions about the uniqueness of human language within the natural world, but also a call to rethink the very categories within which those widely-held assumptions make sense.
