This is the fourth in a series of extracts from Michel Serres: Figures of Thought that I will be posting in the run-up to the book’s publication around April 2020. The archive of all the extracts will be accessible here.
The following exceprt is from Chapter Three of Michel Serres: Figures of Thought, entitled ‘Serres’ Style’
Let no one say that I have said nothing new… the arrangement of the subject is new. When we play tennis, we both play with the same ball, but one of us places it better.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
When I first pitched a book on Michel Serres to Edinburgh University Press, the anonymous reviewers reserved particular enthusiasm for one of the project’s aims, to help readers understand why Serres writes as he does. And for good reason: the first impression most readers will have of Serres’ writing, certainly from texts of the mid 1980s onwards, is of his rich, ‘poetic’ style which moves quickly between a bewildering range of ideas and topics and deluges the reader with a cataract of allusions and intertextual references. We cannot press far into Serres’ works without being brought face to face with the twin and inextricably intertwined questions of his style of writing and his style of thinking.
In terms of his style of thinking, Serres’ determination to range across diverse subject matter in multiple disciplines poses a problem for many. In his 1986 interview with Serres Florian Rötzer wastes no time in cutting to the quick: ‘People reproach many French philosophers for mixing forms of discourse. For this reason, they take them to be irrational theoreticians. In what sense do you understand yourself? Is your philosophy rationalistic?’[1] The suspicion is that Serres’ thought must lack rigour if it seeks to cover so much ground. This is also the accusation of Alan Sokal in Fashionable Nonsense.[2] Even readers with a sympathetic predisposition to Serres acknowledge that his style of thinking poses substantial challenges to his readers. Steven Connor, for example, argues that his ‘undockability’ and ‘unpocketability’ are reasons why he is not better known in the Anglophone world.[3] Connor goes on to insist that it is precisely because of the cross-disciplinary sweep of Serres’ writing that ‘his work, and, even more importantly, the style of thinking and writing that his work warrants, has a claim on us’.[4] If the breadth of Serres’ thought is a problem for readers, so too is its mode of expression. Pierpaolo Antonello admits that there is ‘certainly a problem of style, of linguistic complexity, undertones, and ambiguities that are part of the very method Serres follows in his readings on philosophy, art, or science’[5]
It would be hasty, however, to dismiss Serres as just one more ‘French thinker’ of ‘high theory’, afflicted with the national disease of incomprehensibility. This judgment remains blind to those distinctive features of his writing that set him apart from his French contemporaries, a point that Steven Connor beautifully articulates:
Compared with the mannered ostentations of a Derrida, the orphic esotericism of Lacan, the bristling technicism of a Deleuze, the dandiacal exhibitionism of a Baudrillard or a Žižek, Michel Serres’ writing displays a uniquely fluid ingenuity, a flamboyant inventiveness, a stripped, fragile tenderness.[6]
While I would disagree with the rhetorically over-inflated dismissals of other French thinkers here, the characterisation of Serres is on point. His style is unique among French philosophers of his generation, bringing its own unique rationale, challenges and possibilities.
Among readers of Serres there is general agreement that his style of thinking and writing is a natural, even necessary aspect of his intellectual journey. For Bruno Latour, ‘his style is part and parcel of his very philosophical argument’[7] in a French tradition for which ‘[t]he deepest content of what they have to say is first of all a style, a form, a particular way of saying it’.[8] Antonello suggests that Serres’ linguistic complexity is unavoidable because ‘language embeds knowledge; language is a historical palimpsest that needs to be unveiled and that traces the anthropological and cultural history of its formation’,[9] and Patrick Rödel insists that, with Serres as with any philosopher, the search for truth and for beauty are the same philosophical exercise and that Serres’ ‘ultimate courage to think’ can only be experienced in a language that befits this undertaking.[10] Finally, Latour’s own response to his question of why Serres and other French writers cannot just ‘say what he means in plain language’ is that ‘what they have to say is that the plain language is to be transformed for something to be said’.[11] In A 1987 interview with Geneviève James, Serres offers a similar explanation of his own style in The Five Senses. Insisting that ‘logic is inseparable from style’,[12] he explains:
I have tried to use 1) the composition and 2) the style that are the closest to the object and the theory, in order to obtain an effect of stained-glass or juxtaposition as in the facets of a fly’s eye, to achieve an effect of multiplicity.[13]
The aim is nothing less than to ‘make a book that is as faithful as possible to what we are describing’ and, as Serres points out, ‘that, after all, is what philosophy is’.[14] Elsewhere, he broadens this principle to the whole to his work, explaining that ‘I try to adapt the way in which I speak and write to the phenomena that I strive to see and grasp’ (Pan 96).[15] Commenting on the fly-like, exodic and seemingly random movement of his writing from one point to another, he explains that ‘it was necessary to find a new language’ because ‘the classical or technical style of philosophy […] didn’t have the terms or operators capable of describing this method’ (Ec 108-9/C 71-2).[16]
It should therefore be no surprise to us that Serres cultivates his style so intentionally. He is, it will be remembered, seeking not merely to convey a list of facts or propositions but to ‘produce a global intuition, profound and sensible’ (Ec 170/C 115),[17] a way of holding oneself, bodily and intellectually, in the world, a material, imaginative, cognitive, corporeal disposition and a set of sensitivities from which flow assumptions, understandings, concepts and theories. For everyone, not just for Serres, the way we use language is a powerful influence upon, and reflection of, our way of inhabiting the world. Our vocabulary and its register, our intonations, the rhythms of our written and spoken sentences, the metaphors and images that help us navigate the world, are tools with which we sculpt our experience and make sense of our lives. If we want to understand how someone sees the world, it pays to listen not just—and often not primarily—to what she says, but to how she says it. To be sure, Serres uses language to shape and express his global intuition in a more intense way than most, but the difference is one of degree, not of kind.
The current chapter will examine Serres’ style in the context of his aim to produce a global intuition, moving through a series of increasingly broad perspectives: vocabulary, tropes, concepts, books, and his oeuvre as a whole. It will argue that the demand for Serres to speak plainly is an attempt to impose upon him the stylistic equivalent of the Cartesian umbilical thinking discussed in the preceding two chapters. Far from being an affectation or indulgence, Serres writes in the way that his global intuition demands. He also inhabits the global intuition that his style demands.
Notes
[1] Florian Rötzer, Conversations with French Philosophers (New Jersey, Humanities Press: 1995) 87.
[2] Sokal, who seems to have read at least some of A History of Scientific Thought, gives Serres the following begrudging acknowledgment: ‘the work of Serres is replete with more-or-less poetic allusions to science and its history; but his assertions, though extremely vague, are in general neither completely meaningless nor completely false’ (Alan Sokal and Jean Brichmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1999) 8). Sokal either does not understand, or does not take time to engage with, Serres’s aspectual pluralism. His project is to purify the immaculate pomerium of science from the confusion, contingency and transience of the humanities, reducing Serres’s isomorphisms to ill-judged metaphors, asserting for example that ‘percolation theory deals with the flow of fluids in porous media and says nothing about the nature of space and time’ (Sokal and Brichmont, Fashionable Nonsense 263).
[3] Steven Connor, ‘The Hard and the Soft’, a talk given at the Centre for Modern Studies, University of York, 26 November 2009. Available at http://www.stevenconnor.com/hardsoft/
[4] Connor, ‘The Hard and the Soft’.
[5] Pierpaolo Antonello, ‘Celebrating a Master: Michel Serres’, Configurations 8:2 (2000) 165-169, 166.
[6] Connor, ‘The Hard and the Soft’.
[7] Bruno Latour, ‘The Enlightenment without the Critique: A Word on Michel Serres’ Philosophy’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series vol. 21 (March 1987) 83-97, 96.
[8] Latour, ‘The Enlightenment without the Critique’ 96.
[9] Antonello, ‘Celebrating a Master’ 166
[10] Patrick Rödel, Michel Serres, la sage-femme du monde (Paris: Éditions le Pommier, 2016) 7, 10.
[11] Latour, ‘The Enlightenment without the Critique’ 96.
[12] ‘la logique est inséparable du style.’ Geneviève James, ‘Entretien avec Michel Serres’, The French Review 60:6 (1987): 788-796, 793.
[13] ‘J’ai essayé d’utiliser 1) la composition, 2) le style les plus proches de l’objet et de la théorie, pour obtenir un effet de vitrail, ou de juxtaposition comme les facettes de l’œil de la mouche, pour avoir un effet de multiplicité. ’ James, ‘Entretien avec Michel Serres’, 795.
[14] ‘fabriquer un livre qui soit le plus fidèle possible de ce qu’on décrit. Et cela, ça s’appelle quand même de la philosophie.’ James, ‘Entretien avec Michel Serres’, 795.
[15] ‘j’essaie d’adapter la manière dont je parle et j’écris aux phénomènes que je peine à voir et à saisir’.
[16] ‘le style classique ou technique de la philosophie, […] n’avait pas de termes ou d’opérateurs qui permettaient de dire cette méthode […] il fallait trouver une langue neuve’
[17] ‘mon but n’est pas d’avoir raison à toute force, mais de produire une intuition globale, profonde et sensée’.
