In this excerpt from Michel Serres: Figures of Thought I address the question of whether Serres should be considered an “ecological” thinker.
Abbreviations
Mal Malfeasance
MP Le Mal propre
MiS ‘Michel Serres’, in Florian Rötzer, Conversations with French Philosophers
Pan Pantopie: de Hermès à Petite Poucette
Serres’ relation to ecological concerns is complex. On the one hand, along with the communication revolution and the turn to materialism and the object, ecology is one of the areas in which his thought is prescient, even prophetic, and he anticipates the early twenty-first century resurgence in ecological thought by over a decade. Indeed, his work has been described as ‘the beginning of all ecology’[1] and he was thinking deeply and at length about ecological issues at a time when few others cared to address the subject: ‘I was one of the first, if not the first, to make ecology not just a matter of fundamental urgency but above all a philosophical and even metaphysical question: the oldest question of philosophy, the idea of nature, had to be re-evaluated’ (Pan 62).[2] When we engage with Michel Serres’ ecological thought, therefore, we are not simply reading a reaction to a recent critical trend, much less jumping on a modish bandwagon. This shadows a wider point of crucial importance to understanding Serres as an ecological thinker, for much ecological rhetoric—from both philosophers and politicians—is reactive, seeking to respond to changes and problems, always on the back foot, always fighting a losing battle to ‘protect’ and ‘conserve’. Eschewing this responsive paradigm, Serres’ thought offers us a richer ecological vision that can set a positive agenda for change. His proactive stance is driven by the question he poses: whereas much ecological thought asks the question ‘how?’—How do we reduce emissions? How should we think of ‘nature’ differently? How do we ‘save the planet’?—Serres insists on the deeper question ‘why?’—Why do we pollute?, and ‘what do we really want when we dirty the world?’ (MP 57/Mal 40, see also Pan 251-2).[3]
On the other hand, however, ‘ecology’ and, a fortiori, ‘eco-criticism’, are singularly infelicitous terms to describe Serres’ thinking if they are taken to indicate that attention should be paid to particular objects (trees, animals, rivers…) or particular questions (climate change, deforestation…) as opposed to others by a certain theoretical discourse or approach (‘eco-philosophy’). Such local, circumscribed ideas as ‘ecology’ or ‘eco-philosophy’ not only militate against Serres’ Leibnizian pluralism and interdisciplinarity but are also, in his estimation, one of the causes of the ‘ecological crisis’. His work from the 1990s onwards abounds with themes that would commonly be filed under ‘ecology’, but if he uses the term relatively little and refuses to qualify his writing as ecological (see MiS 92), it is because of his fundamental conviction that it is impossible to isolate a set of discrete ideas under this label. Any attempt to discuss ecological themes in Serres’ work must therefore find a way to negotiate the refusal of his thought to become narrowly ecological.
While Serres quite reasonably seeks to avoid the label ‘ecological’, it is not correct to say that, for this reason, his thought has nothing to do with ecology. In a 2014 interview he expands on his aversion to the term in a way that helps us better appreciate how he situates his own intervention in The Natural Contract:
– Faced with the grave threats to the future of our planet, you have proposed that we adopt a ‘natural contract’. Was this an ecological move on your part?
– No, certainly not. I carefully avoided the term. There is a confusion today about the word ‘ecology’, depending on whether it is used by politicians or scientists. In political discourse ecology is the ethical desire to preserve nature, understood as a wild and virgin space, protected from the ravages of humanity. In science, ecology (oikos logos: knowledge of the milieu, the habitat) is quite a different thing. Defined by the biologist Ernst Haeckel at the end of the XIX century, it is a highly sophisticated science that tries to gather all the geological, chemical, biological, vegetal, and animal interactions that constitute a milieu, for example the biotope of Mont Ventoux.
Face aux menaces qui pèsent sur l’avenir de notre planète, vous avez proposé de passer un « contrat naturel ». C’était une démarche écologiste de votre part ?
Non, surtout pas. J’ai soigneusement évité le terme. Il y a une confusion aujourd’hui sur le mot « écologie », selon qu’il est employé par les politiques ou par les scientifiques. Dans le discours politique, l’écologie, c’est le souci éthique de préserver la nature, conçue comme un espace vierge et sauvage, prémuni des atteintes de l’homme. En sciences, l’écologie (oikos logos : connaissance du milieu, de l’habitat) désigne tout autre chose. Définie par le biologiste Ernst Haeckel à la fin du XIXe siècle, c’est une science ultrasophistiquée qui essaie de rassembler toutes les interactions, géologiques, chimiques, biologiques, végétales, animales, qui constituent un milieu—par exemple, le biotope du mont Ventoux. (Pan 233)
The two senses of ecology here, it will be noted, are in direct opposition to each other. The first sense, which I propose to call ‘restricted ecology’, reinforces the supposed dichotomy between a thoroughly human politics and a wild or unkempt nature, or between exclusively human environmental damage and an unspoiled world. Casting nature as a pure, virgin other it takes it upon itself to be nature’s ward, labouring might and main to preserve her chastity from humanity’s own advances, assuming a static view of the natural world and a reactive and conservative stance in relation to it. The second sense of ecology, by contrast, seeks to find links, dependencies and passages between all the entities in a given milieu, travelling across dichotomies and back again. Like North-West passages, these relationships are complex, constantly changing, creative and exploratory. While Serres does not write about ecology in the first, restricted sense, his thought most certainly is ecological in the second sense of insisting on relationships and continuities across apparent divisions and differences. The most fruitful way to understand Serres’ contribution to ecology in the narrow, political sense must necessarily pass through his elaboration of an ecology in the broader, scientific sense. I introduce the term ‘general ecology’ to describe this latter ecology in Serresian thought, proceeding as it does not by drawing distinctions and creating oppositions in the spirit of academic ‘criticism’ but by seeking translations and equivalences between seemingly disparate areas of thought or domains of existence.
[1] ‘le commencement de toute écologie’. Jean-Marie Auzias, Michel Serres, philosophe occitan (Lyon: Fédérop/Jorn, 1992) 9.
[2] ‘J’ai été un des premiers, sinon le premier, à faire de l’écologie, non seulement une urgence fondamentale, mais surtout une question philosophique et même métaphysique : le concept le plus ancien de la pensée philosophique, l’idée de nature, devait être réévalué’.
[3] ‘Question : que voulons-nous, en amont, lorsque nous salissons le monde?’, emphasis original.
