This is the fifth 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 Four of Michel Serres: Figures of Thought, entitled ‘Language’
The origin of language
Serres offers a radically naturalised account of language, locating its origin in the rhythms and patterns of the natural world. In the modern world, however, we have forgotten this origin, or try to hide it. We have fenced language off in a human enclosure, and like Ulysses’ sailors we have stopped our ears to any languages other than human. The world has become hidden to ‘we, Latins’ who no longer hear or understand its sounds (Bi 42/Bio 41). Serres seeks to give us back these noises muffled by our linguistic anthropocentrism, and with them a new and much enlarged understanding of language. Whereas mid-twentieth linguistic philosophy understands language in terms of structures and differences, Serres’ paradigm is multisensorial, foregrounding the auditory, the olfactory and the gustatory and arguing that these senses privilege the singular and leave the body intact in contrast to the analytical abstraction of vision and hearing (CS 23/FS 26).[1] This is no accident: ‘hearing is better at integrating than analysing’ (Ge 22/Gen 7),[2] and Serres is seeking to provide an integrated account of meaning, signals and language, not one that encloses human rationality and language in a sui generis domain. It is also more difficult to isolate and separate the hearer from the heard than the seer from the seen; sound is a medium in which one bathes, constantly mixing everything within it, whereas vision respects distance and separation. Serres also prefers hearing because, like the background noise that plays such an important part in his account of language, it is always present: even in the absence of all other sound—such as in an anechoic chamber—I begin to hear the intropathetic noise of my own body:
When the sense of sight is the model of knowing, I am not always thinking. If hearing is the model, I am always thinking. Well, I am always thinking. Hearing, no doubt, is a better model, where the occultations are never total, and where the flashes always overlap. (Gen 61)
Quand la vue est modèle de la connaissance., je ne pense pas toujours. Si l’ouïe est le modèle, je pense toujours. Or, je pense toujours. L’ouïe, sans doute, est un meilleur modèle, où les occultations ne sont jamais totales, et où les éclats, toujours, se chevauchent. (Ge 105-6)
Even in withdrawal from the natural world, even for the linguistic philosopher sitting at her desk, the background noise continues to purr, produced by the murmurs of the body itself, by the ‘brouhaha that doubtless comes from the effervescence produced by the admirable web of nerves and vessels, by the exchanges of energy in which the organs, tissues and cells engage, following billions of biochemical programs’ (RH 46-8).[3]
Noise
From the second volume of the Hermès series onwards, Serres develops a sustained reflection on the background noises of our existence, from cosmic background noise through the sounds of the natural world to the noises constantly generated by our own bodies. It is in these noises that language finds its earliest origins:
A four-stage rocket launches the birth of language, […] first the muted heat, towards white noise, from this brouhaha to the first signals, then from these to timid melodies, and finally from these to the first vowels… Noise, cry, song, music, voice… all precede the basic utterance, before the language of the story.
Une fusée à quatre étages lance la naissance du langage, […] : elle sourd de la chaleur, d’abord, vers le bruit blanc ; de ce brouhaha va aux premiers signaux ; puis de ceux-ci à de timides mélodies ; enfin de celles-ci aux premières voyelles… Bruit, cri, chant, musique, voix… précèdent l’énonciation de base, avant la langue du récit. (RH 49-50; see also Mus 88)
Tracing these stages—from noise through music to the voice—will show us to what extent, and to when effect, Serres naturalises language. In Genesis the working title of which was Noise, he insists that all knowledge begins with noise:
Background noise is the first object of metaphysics, the noise of the crowd is the first object of anthropology. The background noise made by the crowd is the first object of history. Before language, before even the word, there was noise. (Gen 54)
Le bruit de fond est le premier objet de la métaphysique, la noise de la foule est le premier objet de l’anthropologie. Le bruit de fond que fait la foule est le premier objet d’histoire. Avant le langage, avant même le verbe, le bruit. (Ge 96)
As he stresses so emphatically in The Parasite, noise[4] is not to be eliminated from communication as something that impedes it, but rather it makes all communication possible in the first place. To think that noise must be eradicated is a symptom of the Cartesian pomerium, the attempt to create a pure, sacred space of absolute meaning.
Figure 4.1: The false dichotomy of message and noise
Already in Hermès II: l’interférence Serres insists that background noise is the ‘universal condition of all exchange’ (H2 192-3).[5] This noise is not the equivalent of the Saussurean langue, language as system, as opposed to parole, language as utterance. It is stubbornly material and resolutely non-human:
physical or thermodynamic noise […] is the condition of circulation of every message in general, and that which remains in the absence of all messages, a material that remains unconstrained by any form superimposed on it, an objective panting that comes before every signal, every sound, every sign, every singular language
le bruit physique ou thermodynamique […] est condition de circulation de tout message en général et qui demeure en l’absence de tout message, matière aléatoire de toute forme surajoutée, halètement objectif préalable à tout signal, à tout son, à tout signe, à toute langue singulière (H2 192-3)
It is not that our language and communication fight against the background noise in order to be heard, or that the background noise confuses their message; they are themselves modulations of the background noise, moulded from its raw material, carried by noise. No logos without noise (Ge 22/Gen 7). This naturalisation of language bears comparison with the later Merleau-Ponty who, in his lectures on nature at the Collège de France, insists that:
The Nature in us must have some relation to the Nature outside of us; moreover, Nature outside of us must be unveiled to us by the Nature that we are. It is the nexus we are seeking, not the arrangement [of nature] under the gaze of God. Bergson: whatever the nature of the world and being, we are of it [nous en sommes].[6]
In the same way, human language for Serres is of the background noise, and the languages within human culture must have some relation to the languages that precede them.
Figure 4.2: Noise does not obstruct the message, it carries it.
In the Introduction to Hermès II: l’interférence Serres calls the background noise ‘this mute logos that is the very enigma into which we are plunged’ and an ‘objective transcendental’ (H2 15).[7] 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.[8] 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.
Serres undertakes a much more sustained reflection on background noise in Hermès IV: La Distribution, not least in the chapter entitled ‘The origin of language’. Here, noise and disorder appear as the ground against which any figure of knowledge or understanding must appear: ‘Order is but a rarity where disorder is ordinary. The exception becomes the rule and the rule becomes the exception’ (H4 10).[9] Noise is the real before all structure (H4 14), though not like the Lacanian Real which is inaccessible to consciousness in any direct way, which ‘resists symbolization absolutely’, and direct exposure to which results in trauma.[10] In the same way that he naturalises the Kantian transcendental, here we see Serres naturalising the Real; it is no longer a feature restricted to human (or even sentient) experience, but an observable feature of the universe originating, ultimately, in the Big Bang itself. At one point in Récits d’humanisme Serres speculates as to whether we might call the noise of my nervous system and organs an ‘unconscious’ (RH 46-8; see also Mus 123). It is a tantalizing suggestion, and one very much in line with his account of the emergence of signal, thought and communication from the incipient pregnancy of background noise. It fits also with his naturalisation and objectification of the Kantian a priori. This Serresian unconscious cannot be inscribed within a Freudian model; not only is it a feature of the whole body and not just the psyche, but it participates in and is drawn from the universal brouhaha of the world.
Notes
[1] Serres also suggests in The Five Senses that touch should displace vision as the pre-eminent sense, for all senses involve touch and need to be re-conceived on this basis. The auditory, for example, is associated with touch by virtue of the material translation of information by touch, percussion, and resonance.
[2] ‘l’ouïe intègre mieux qu’elle ne peut analyser’.
[3] ‘brouhaha issu sans doute de l’effervescence produite par le réseau admirable des nerfs et des vaisseaux, par les échanges d’énergie auxquels s’adonnent les organes, les tissus et les cellules, selon des milliards de programmes biochimiques’.
[4] ‘Les parasites’ is French for the crackling of static interference or noise on a communication signal.
[5] ‘condition universelle de tout échange’.
[6] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 2003) 206, translation altered. ‘Il faut donc par exemple pour nous que la Nature en nous ait quelque rapport avec la Nature hors de nous, il faut même que la Nature hors de nous nous soit dévoilée par la Nature que nous sommes. C’est le nexus et non la mise en place sous le regard de Dieu que nous cherchons. Bergson: de quelque nature que soient le monde et l’Etre, nous en sommes — Par la nature en nous nous pouvons connaître la Nature, et réciproquement c’est de nous que nous parlent les vivants et même l’espace’. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La nature, notes, cours du Collège de France (Paris: Seuil, 1995) 267.
[7] ‘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’.
[8] 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).
[9] ‘L’ordre n’est qu’une rareté où le désordre est ordinaire. L ’exception devient règle et la règle devient exception’.
[10] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book I. Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-4, trans. with notes by John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988) 66.
