This is the third 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 Two of Michel Serres: Figures of Thought, entitled ‘Space and Time’
Multiplying temporalities
Serres opposes Cartesian time by multiplying temporalities. Already in Le Système de Leibniz he is impugning ‘the over-simplified notion that we have of time’ and insisting that ‘to extend Leibnizian thinking by generalising it, we must take seriously the idea of a differentiation in multiple elementary times’ (SL 285; see also Ec 89/C 58).[1] For Serres, everything exists in at least three distinct broad temporalities (At 126-7) which can be further subdivided, combining them in different ways. The first time is the reversible, clockwork time of the Classical age, when no fundamental law was thought to dictate the direction of time’s flow. The second time is the globally entropic time of the second law of thermodynamics, of Carnot’s heat engine that carries everything towards death. This thermodynamic principle was formalised in 1865 by Rudolph Clausius who, drawing on heavily on Carnot’s work on heat engines, coined the term ‘entropy’ to describe the irrecoverable heat inevitably lost from any mechanical system. Laplace brings this irreversible time into the natural sciences with a cosmogony that supplements Newton’s reversible cosmology with a dimension of becoming (JVHC 36), and Darwin inscribes irreversible time at the heart of the natural sciences (JVHC 39). The eternal universe of Pascal is no more: ‘Immersed in time the universe likewise is born, develops, evolves, wears out and, perhaps, will die’ (JVHC 36).[2] Time enters into science. The third time is the locally negentropic time of codes and information, preserving complexity against the general decay of order (H4 287).[3] The idea of negentropy was developed in the 1930s, describing a pocket of information preserved in a wider context of entropic decay (see JVHC 136). It is a time encrusted in the living beings who ‘follow an evolution that Bergson called creative, of which we can at least say that it runs in the opposite direction to the thermodynamic arrow’ (H5 79).[4]
Serres does not understand these three times to be successive but concurrent and layered in our experience of the world:
Our living organisms, too, know the synchrony of several times: they are Newtonian when they get up and go to sleep with the sun, carrying clocks inside them that go haywire when they rapidly cross time zones; according to the second principle of thermodynamics they die exhausted, worn out, covered in wrinkles; but sometimes, unpredictably, they are Bergsonian or Darwinian, reproducing granddaughters better than they are
Nos organismes vivants connaissent, eux aussi, la synchronie de plusieurs temps : newtoniens, ils se lèvent et se couchent avec le soleil, portent en eux des horloges qui s’affolent lors de parcours rapides traversant les méridiens, meurent, épuisés, usés, couverts de rides, suivant le second principe de la thermodynamique, mais, imprévisibles, bergsoniens ou darwiniens, parfois se reproduisent en petites filles améliorées (At 99)
The coexistence of these three times may well be a synchrony, but it is not a harmony. Serres confesses to being able to offer no account of how the different times are brought together (H5 80), and presents our experience of living in multiple temporalities as one of being
torn, plunged in a flow with three unrelated times, whose sweeping along we don’t know how to form into a whole. Contradictory among themselves, these three times nevertheless bear everyone’s existence in that, punctual for appointments, we observe the work of our profession and collective holidays, we are soon going to die from exhaustion, but we love, think, invent and reproduce? (G xxxii, translation altered)
écartelés, plongés dans un flux à trois temps sans rapport, dont nous ne savons pas composer l’entraînement. Comment nouer, en effet, un brin réversible à deux fils irréversibles et inversés l’un de l’autre? Contradictoires entre eux, ces trois temps, pourtant, portent l’existence de chacun, en ce qu’exact aux rendez-vous, il observe les travaux de sa profession et les fêtes collectives, va bientôt mourir d’épuisement, mais aime, pense, invente et se reproduit? (OG 37)
Figure 2.6: Serres opposes the Classical understanding of time by generalising and multiplying it
In addition to the major categories of reversible, entropic and negentropic times, Serres argues that we also live in at least five additional temporalities (H 182-3). The first is the time of a ‘memory which mocks history’ in which I am the contemporary of Montaigne, Cervantes, Ovid, The Odyssey, Chopin or Fauré. This time bears striking resemblances to Deleuze’s and Bergson’s cone of memory, which similarly collapses all past experience into a simultaneity. The second is a biological, Darwinian time of filiation, drawing Serres to ‘admire my granddaughters, ten times more beautiful than the snows of yesteryear’ (H 184).[5] The third is the time of the ‘Great Story’ (Grand Récit) of the universe beginning with the Big Bang and ending, sometime in the future, perhaps with a Big Crunch. My body is composed of molecules that have their origin millions of years ago in this story, themselves formed from yet more ancient atoms: I am a palimpsestic composite of different moments in the Great Story. This dimension of time challenges and expands existing theories of narrative identity, as I have noted elsewhere.[6] The fourth additional time that Serres identifies is the time ‘of rarities, of unpredictable novelties that surge forth in me without warning, as twaddle or as ideas set in pretty, gleaming words’ (H 184).[7] In its rarity, novelty and unpredictability this fourth time is the time of creation and invention, though not in the sense of the supposedly definitive historical ruptures that Serres opposes by generalising. Finally, he identifies ‘the time of the Messiah’ who may come, or come again, which resonates with Derrida’s messianism without messianicity. Serres’ multiple times, then, are complex, incorporating dimensions that in other twentieth- and twenty-first century philosophies are isolated and given prominence in a way that, in each case, risks a temporal umbilicism. Serres’ response to the threat of such umbilical thinking, once more, is to multiply temporalities.
Percolation
From The Birth of Physics onwards, Serres further complicates his account of time by introducing the idea of percolation, a motif that stands in relation to time as landscape does to space, and that draws out the temporal dimension of topology.[8] Running through and drawing together these scattered treatments of time is the constant refrain that ‘[t]ime flows in an extraordinarily complex, unexpected, complicated way’, and that ‘[t]ime is paradoxical; it folds or twists; it is as various as the dance of flames in a brazier—here interrupted, there vertical, mobile, and unexpected’ (Ec 89/C 58).[9]
Serres’ ‘percolation’ is a rejection of the simple, linear metaphor of ‘flow’ (Ec 91/C 58). The theory of percolation was developed by Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, a Nobel Laureate in physics (1991) who understood the term to mean ‘random flowing in a random environment’ (OG 4/G xxxviii)[10] and who proposed percolation as—in the title of one of his famous papers— ‘a unifying concept’ (‘un concept unificateur’). Serres shares this lofty claim with de Gennes, heralding percolation as ‘a global vision, finally, of space and time’ (EPF 211).[11]
Percolation is not an aporia that blocks time, but neither does it let time flow unimpeded. The Latin colare (etymon of the modern French couler, to flow) means ‘to filter’: time passes, and time does not pass. Percolation is not always smooth; it includes tipping points and sudden changes: ‘Time does not flow, does not pour en masse; it filters or percolates. Above certain thresholds it does not flow any more. My soul and our history are born when they cross thresholds of percolation’ (RH 116).[12] It borders on the chaotic as it ‘percolates in several directions, multiple speeds and numerous rhythms, multivalent like tolerance, rich like a peaceful thought’ (S 296/St 169).[13] ‘Simple and laminar flux’, where a fluid flows in parallel layers that do not interfere with each other and are not turbulent, is ‘a particular case’ of percolation (OG 40/G xxxv), in the same way that Cartesian geometrical space is a particular case of space among others: once more percolation opposes the linear view of time by generalising it. ‘What we took to be the common and reasonable current’, in other words a simple, linear flow, ‘amounts to a rarity’ (OG 40/G xxxv).[14]
Serres illustrates what he means by taking Apollinaire’s famous lines about love, loss, and the Mirabeau bridge over the Seine in Paris. Serres treats Le Pont Mirabeau in the same way that the old MTV show Pimp My Ride treated suburban Los Angeles cars: supercharging it with all manner of new features, trims and capabilities. Apollinaire’s original poem begins in this way:
Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine
And our loves
Must I remember them
Joy always came after pain
That the night would come and the hour ring
The days go by and I remain[15]
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine
Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure[16]
Whatever water may or may not do as it passes under the Pont Mirabeau, Serres insists, it does not obey a simple, laminar flux in the way that Apollinaire’s poem implies. In Geometry he gives the surrealist a lesson in fluid dynamics:
not all the water under the Mirabeau Bridge, which Apollinaire doesn’t watch, will necessarily go to Rouen, and the water that flows into the Channel didn’t necessarily pass under his lover’s Bridge … countercurrents impelled part of the flow to head back upstream; eddies and turbulences seized another part under the bridge pier, randomly and in a circle; evaporation transformed yet another part into vapor (G xxxv)
toute l’eau qu’Apollinaire ne regarde pas, sous le pont Mirabeau, n’ira point, obligatoirement, à Rouen et celle qui se jette dans la Manche ne passa pas forcément sous le Pont de ses amours … des contre-courants poussèrent partie du flux à rebrousser vers l’amont, des tourbillons et turbulences en saisissent une autre, sous la pile, au hasard et en cercle, l’évaporation en transforma une autre encore en vapeur (GO 41, translation altered; see also Mus 66)
Time indeed flows like the Seine (and the Yukon and the Ganges), providing that we understand the flow of the Seine to be anything but laminar (see also Ec 90/C 58). Like the turbulent, evaporating Seine of crosscurrents and eddies, Serres understands temporality more broadly as ‘a complex surface, comprising “chimneys” of strong acceleration, “bottlenecks” that block ascensions, zones of immobile values, tears and so forth’ (H1 101, see also OG 29/G xxvi).[17] So Serres (and why not!) takes it upon himself to pimp Le Pont Mirabeau by setting it on a more accurate scientific footing: ‘Under the Mirabeau Bridge the Seine flows exceptionally; certain days pass on, others return or remain, for which alone the hour rings; yes, our loves return, sometimes, like these percolating waters’ (OG 40/G xxxv).[18]
Percolating time, furthermore, is ‘real time’, the time we encounter if we seek ‘to remain faithful to the things themselves’ (OG 41/G xxxvi).[19] Species percolate (At 114); information percolates (At 111); rivers, time, the world and life percolate (At 100), and the weather, that etymological twin of time,[20] also percolates, changing not in a linear way but moving stochastically, often unpredictably, running in eddies, slowing down, speeding up, changing direction abruptly like the fly, leading Bergson to define weather (le temps) as ‘uninterrupted gushing forth of unpredictable novelties’
(quoted on H 185).[21] We may, misguidedly, choose to ‘reduce such a complexity to a corridor or a continuous line uniformally linking one point to another, successively’ (OG 41/G xxxvi, translation altered),[22] but then we are dealing with our own philosophical artefact, and no longer with the time that there is.
It is also percolation that provides Serres with an alternative to the ‘calendar pathos’ [pathétique du calendrier, NP 9/BOP 3, translation altered] of instant revolutionary change and to the ‘Galilean moment’: ‘The regime of revolutions is no doubt only apparent. What if, behind them or beneath these schisms, flowed (or percolated) slow and viscous fluxes?’ (Ec 202/C 138-9).[23] Serres appeals to the shifting of tectonic plates, a very slow movement that can nevertheless produce dramatic effects, notably tsunamis and earthquakes. Note that he is not denying the possibility of revolutionary change, but opposing an umbilical account of revolution by multiplying the instances and dynamics of change beyond revolution’s simple temporality of ‘before’ and ‘after’ which, though it works well as a ruse for selling laundry powder, is an inadequate view of history.
To divorce the earthquakes from the very gradually percolating plates that cause them would be as wrongheaded as to deny that a Revolution is a dramatic expression of similarly subterranean, gradual changes. Below those plates themselves, furthermore, ‘is a core of heat that maintains or propels the moving crust’ (Ec 203/C 139).[24] A further, important consequence that Serres draws in relation to these temporal tectonic plates is that events which can seem gratuitous or isolated on the surface have deep connections that could never be fathomed from a superficial standpoint:
Are the breaks in history similarly brought about from below by an extraordinarily slow movement that puts us in communication with the past, but at immense depths? The surface gives the impression of totally discontinuous ruptures, earthquakes—in this case, quakes of history or of mobs, sometimes—whose brief violence destroys cities and remodels landscapes but which, at a very deep level, continue an extraordinarily regular movement, barely perceptible, on an entirely different scale of time. (C 139)[25]
Les cassures de l’histoire sont-elles, de même, entretenues, en dessous, par un mouvement extraordinairement lent qui nous met en communication avec le passé, mais à des profondeurs immenses ? Alors, la surface donne l’impression de ruptures parfaitement discontinues, tremblements de terre — ici tremblements d’histoire ou de foules parfois — dont la brève violence détruit les villes et remodèle les paysages, mais, très bas, continue un transport extraordinairement régulier, à peine perceptible, sur une tout autre échelle de temps. (Ec 203)
In a paragraph that gives a fascinating insight into the way in which Serres understands the operation of this unseen, subterranean world, he claims that the history of religions ‘forms the lowest plate—the deepest, the most buried, almost invisible, and surely the slowest moving’, and yet that there is a level deeper still: ‘what I would like to catch a glimpse of, beyond that, and deeper yet, is the furnace-like interior, so hidden, that blindly moves us’ (Ec 203/C 139).[26] This ‘furnace-like interior’ where, presumably, there is no distinction between the different disciplines or ‘aspects’ at all, is the geological equivalent of what, in Le Système de Leibniz Serres calls ‘structure’. We shall examine just one such subterranean connection at the close of this chapter: the resonance between an ancient sacrificial rite and a tragedy at the cutting edge of modern technology.
The very slow speed of tectonic movement is one instance of a more general principle for Serres according to which everything is subject to time, sometimes fast-moving and sometimes glacial:
Objects are flames frozen by different time-scales. My body is a slightly slower flame than this crimson curtain which consumes the logs. Some things, for example stones, are slower still, while others, like suns, are more agitated: a thousand times make their edges pulsate (H5 53, Steven Connor’s translation).[27]
The movement of a flame, like that of tectonic plates, is not linear and Cartesian. It flickers, moves back on itself, changes direction and leaps. In short, it percolates.
This account of time as a flickering of variable speeds also yields a new understanding of ‘progress’. In line with Serres’ figure of opposing by generalising, his idea of progress is not linear and unidirectional but complex and percolating: ‘For any given process there are regional evolutions, partial accelerations, temporary regressions, alternations, equilibriums, subtle transformations. The notion [of progress] is plural or pluralistic, whichever’ (SL 284).[28] Indeed, rather than necessarily improving over time Serres argues that philosophical ideas obey a law of entropy according to which they progressively accrete ‘cultural noise’ and can be lost altogether (H1 29 n7). It is important not to read this complexity as a refusal of any progress whatsoever; that would be just as reductive as the symmetrical insistence on uninterrupted incremental historical improvement. Serres does not reject progress, he opposes it by generalising its movement: ‘I see how history progresses; it progresses the way a fly flies. It’s true that a fly progresses, sometimes’ (R 232/Ro 156).[29]
Notes
[1] ‘la notion trop simplifiée que nous avons du temps […] [p]our prolonger alors la pensée leibnizienne en la généralisant, il faut prendre au sérieux l’idée de différentiation en temps élémentaires multiples’.
[2] ‘Plongé dans le temps, l’univers, de même, naît, se développe, évolue, s’use et, peut-être, mourra’.
[3] As Serres points out, it was French physicist Léon Brillouin who defined information as the reverse of entropy (see GB 197).
[4] ‘ils suivent une évolution que Bergson appelait créatrice, dont on peut dire au moins qu’elle court à rebours de la flèche thermodynamique’.
[5] ‘admirer mes petites-filles, plus belles dix fois que les neiges d’antan’.
[6] See Christopher Watkin, Michel Serres’ great story: from biosemiotics to econarratology, Sub-Stance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, 44:3 (2015) 171-187.
[7] ‘des raretés, des nouveautés imprévisibles qui surgissent en moi sans crier gare, en sornettes ou idées serties de mots jolis qui luisent’.
[8] Topology is, of course, already temporal, and the notion of paysage often carries a temporal [dimension] for Serres. The order of exposition in this chapter is not intended to imply a priority of space over time in Serres’s thought; indeed his account is directly set against what Bergson identifies as the spatialised time of Cartesian linearity.
[9] ‘Le temps coule de façon extraordinairement complexe, inattendue, compliquée […] Paradoxal, le temps se plie ou se tord c’est une variété qu’il faudrait comparer à la danse des flammes dans un brasier : ici coupées, là verticales, mobiles et inattendues’.
[10] ‘écoulement aléatoire dans un environnement aléatoire’.
[11] ‘vision globale, enfin, de l’espace et du temps’.
[12] ‘Le temps ne coule pas, ne s’écoule pas en masse; il filtre ou percole. En-dessous de certains seuils, il ne s’écoule plus. Mon âme et notre histoire naissent en passant des seuils de percolation’.
[13] ‘Donc le temps percole en plusieurs sens, multiples vitesses et rythmes nombreux, multivalent comme la tolérance, riche comme une pensée paisible.’
[14] ‘Ce que nous prenions pour le fil usuel et raisonnable se ramène à une rareté’.
[15] My translation.
[16] Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools (Paris: Gallimard, 1944) 14.
[17] ‘une surface complexe, comportant des « cheminées » d’accélération forte, des « cols » d’arrêt d’une ascension, des zones de valeurs stationnaires, des déchirures et ainsi de suite’.
[18] ‘Sous le pont Mirabeau coule exceptionnellement la Seine; certains jours s’en vont, d’autres ou retournent ou demeurent, pour lesquels seulement sonne l’heure; oui, nos amours reviennent, parfois, comme ces percolantes eaux’.
[19] ‘Pour rester fidèle aux choses elles-mêmes’.
[20] Le temps in French means both ‘the time’ and ‘the weather’.
[21] ‘jaillissement ininterrompu d’imprévisibles nouveautés’.
[22] ‘réduire une telle complexité à un couloir ou une ligne continue reliant uniment un point à un autre, à la queue leu leu?’.
[23] ‘Le régime des révolutions n’est sans doute qu’apparent. Et si, derrière elles ou en dessous de ces coupures, coulaient — percolaient ? — des flux lents et visqueux ?’.
[24] ‘Et en dessous, encore, de ces mouvements continus, traînants et tranquilles, mais inexorables, un noyau de chaleur en entretient ou entraîne les tapis roulants.’.
[25] This reflection would be a propitious starting point for a comparison of Serres and Foucault on historical periodization in general and historical ruptures in particular, a reflection which this already long chapter cannot contain. If such a treatment were undertaken from a Serresian point of view, it would likely argue that Foucault’s Bachelardian and Nietzschean historical ruptures are examples of umbilical temporality to set alongside Derrida’s messianicity, Deleuze’s duration and Badiou’s event.
[26] ‘Puis-je dire que la fait entrevoir l’histoire des religions, par exemple, qui forme la plaque la plus basse, la plus profonde, la plus enfouie, jusqu’à l’invisible, la plus lente sûrement ; mais je voudrais bien deviner, en outre et en dessous encore, l’intérieure fournaise si enveloppée, qui nous meut aveuglément.’
[27] ‘Les objets sont des flammes gelées par des temps différents. Mon corps est une flamme un peu plus lente que ce rideau cramoisi qui consume les bûches. D’autres choses sont plus lentes encore, pierres, d’autres plus foudroyantes, soleils. Mille temps font battre leurs bords.’
[28] ‘il y a, pour un processus donné, des évolutions régionales, des accélérations partielles, des régressions temporaires, des alternances, des équilibres, des transformations fines : cette notion est plurale ou pluraliste, comme on voudra’.
[29] ‘Je vois comment l’histoire avance, elle avance comme une mouche vole. Il est vrai qu’une mouche avance, parfois’.
