In the Introduction to Hermès II: l’interférence Michel Serres calls the background noise ‘this mute logos that is the very enigma into which we are plunged’ and an ‘objective transcendental’ (H2 15).[1] It is hard to over-estimate the implications of this latter term for Serres’ naturalised account of language. In his Critique of Pure Reason Kant introduced the transcendental categories of the understanding, a priori concepts such as space and time which unify the manifold of intuition and without which our experience of the world would be impossible. Foucault makes an important intervention in when he introduces the ‘historical a priori’ which, unlike Kant’s categories, can change over time.[2] But Foucault’s historical a priori nevertheless remains an artefact of human culture; Serres naturalises the a priori, showing how the transcendental conditions of our knowledge and experience are not an eternal structure of our understanding, nor a feature of our cultural moment, but irreducibly embedded in the noises and rhythms of the world, reversing Kant’s Copernican Revolution that puts the thinking subject at the centre of knowledge with his own Ptolemaic Revolution that makes the subject peripheral to the objective transcendental of natural language and meaning.
[1] ‘Restait à faire varier les objets du monde, pour retrouver en tous lieux l’inscription, l’échange, l’émission et la réception, de ce logos muet qui est l’énigme même où nous sommes plongés. Il existe bien un transcendantal objectif’.
[2] Foucault most fully develops the idea of the historical a priori in Chapter 5 of Part III of The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). The term describes the practices that condition which statements can be accepted as true and real at a given time. Given that ‘discourse has not only a meaning or a truth, but a history’ (127), these a priori conditions can change over time, but their succession is ‘not deductible’ (127). It does not replace the formal a priori, but they operate on ‘two different dimensions’ (128).