This is the sixth 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 Five of Michel Serres: Figures of Thought, entitled ‘Objects’
There was a time when philosophy had to descend from the heavens to the earth […] The time is coming when philosophy will have to descend from the subject to things.[1]
Michel Serres, Hermès II : l’interférence
In the twenty-first century philosophy has experienced something of a ‘thingly turn’,[2] with the rise to prominence of a variety of new materialisms, actor-network theory, thing theory and object oriented ontologies. Serres haunts the corridors of much of this recent material, mentioned in dispatches as a forerunner or as a source for this or that thingly idea that subsequent theorists graft onto their own approaches. But these newly popular theories display a tendency to reach for a rather narrow selection of Serresian ideas, viewing his thought as often as not through the narrow lens of The Parasite, if not the even tighter focus of Serresian notions like the quasi-object or interobjectivity. My aim in this chapter is to let Serres’ broad and complex approach to objects speak for itself, without framing it as the warm-up act for this or that new materialist or object oriented approach. I shall first explore Serres’ ‘pragmatogony’, the distinctive mythical genealogy of objects he offers in Statues, and proceed to compare his account of the object in the ‘new new scientific spirit’ (‘nouveau nouvel esprit scientifique’) of Hermès II: l’interférence to that of Descartes and Bachelard, before reflecting on whether Serres’ thought can properly be called ‘materialist’. I then turn to The Parasite, paying particular attention to the important moves Serres makes in relation to the subject and object, and arguing that the paradigm of the parasite is more radical than we can realise if we simply focus on isolated Serresian ideas like the quasi-object. Serres helps us to see that there exists, in recent treatments objects and things, the same latent sacred/profane divide that characterises many contemporary approaches to language use and muteness. His account of objects also issues in a reading of capitalism distinct form the Marxist-inspired analyses with which contemporary theory is replete.
1: Pragmatogony
It is customary for recent reassessments of the object to define themselves in contradistinction to the Cartesian res cogitans and res existensa. Serres’ genealogy of the subject and object begins much earlier than this, stretching back to the emergence of the first human communities. His analysis of the development of subjects and objects also encompasses the modern and late modern eras, including the linguistic philosophies of the 1960s to 1990s. He does not tell this whole story in any one place, but we can reconstruct it from scattered passages and allusions throughout his work.
In Statues Serres seeks to trace the pre-historical emergence of objects, a task which he labels ‘pragmatogony’.[3] Pragmatogony is a ‘necessarily mythical’[4] undertaking, not only because we cannot travel back into prehistory in order to observe the emergence of objects first hand, but also because the development of the scientific discourse that opposes itself to myth is itself part of the story of pragmatogony, as we shall see below. Four features characterise Serresian pragmatogony: 1) human beings and objects emerge together, 2) they substitute for each another, 3) objects have their origin in death, and 4) objects are first, as Latour would say, ‘matters of concern’ before they are ‘matters of fact’.[5]
Prehistory and the cadaverous object
Serres’ pragmatogony aims at nothing less than an account of the emergence of the object as such,
‘not only of the tool or the beautiful statue, but of the thing in general, ontologically speaking’ (S 162/St 91).[6] The genealogy begins in the mists of prehistory, with the simultaneous emergence on the planet of human beings and objects. ‘The most revolutionary event in human history’, Serres claims, the event by virtue of which humans become humans, is not accession to the abstract in language, but ‘an uprooting from the ensemble of relations we maintain in the family, the group, etc., and which concern only us and them, leading to an accord, perhaps unclear, but sudden and specific, to something external to this ensemble’ (NP 163/BOP 162, emphasis original; see also Ge 146/Gen 87-8).[7] In other words, it is the object that gives birth to the human that gives birth to it.
Before this event of unparalleled significance there existed, according to Serres’ pragmatogonic myth, only the web of relations between animals. This is not to say that those animals did not interact with entities outside of themselves—eating them, climbing them, taking shelter under them—but these entities appeared in the codes and interactions of animal groups only in their instrumental capacity as food or shelter. They had no existence outside their usefulness to the community, and all the messages of the group were conjugated in the first and second persons (NP 163/BOP 132). Things are the unmarked terms of creaturely existence.
The emergence of the first humans is heralded by a new quality of relations to things, characterised by the pronouns ‘voici’ and ‘ecce’: what appears is no longer simply ‘food’ or ‘dwelling’ but ‘the thing itself’, resisting complete subsumption into the economy and aims of the collective. What is new here is the appearance of the object as something impenetrable, something not exhausted by its role in the relations of the community: the fruit is more than my food and the tree more than my home. The first such inassimilable object, Serres argues, and the one which opens the floodgates to all subsequent objects, is the human corpse:
The corpse was the first object for men. Lying before them like a problem and an obstacle, motionless. Any other thing—tree, stone, animal—could or can become individual, collective, private or public property, and in this last case merchandise, stake or fetish. Before the dead body, every subject draws back: the dead body lies there lifeless, cutting out its space, larger lying down than standing, more terrifying dead than alive.
Also the first solid: stiff, hard, rigorous, coherent, substantial, absolutely stable, the first stone statue. (St 91, translation altered)
Le cadavre fut pour les hommes le premier objet. Posé devant eux comme un problème et un obstacle, gisant. N’importe quelle autre chose, arbre, pierre, bête pouvait ou peut entrer dans la propriété, individuelle, collective, privée, publique et dans ce dernier cas marchandise, enjeu ou fétiche. Devant le corps Mort, tous les sujets reculent : il gît là, découpant son espace, plus grand couché que debout, plus terrifiant mort que vif.
Premier solide aussi : raide, dur, rigoureux, cohérent, consistant, absolument stable, première statue de pierre. (S 163)
Resisting any attempt to co-opt it as a means to an end of the community, this recalcitrant object provokes the collective to become visible to itself as a collective, because there is now something in contradistinction to which it can define itself.[8]
This hominisation through objects is accompanied by a symmetrical ‘thingification’ of life, or what Serres calls ‘the growing objectification of our intersubjective relations’ (P 88/Par 65),[9] including the domestication and rearing of animals and the creation of tools, devices and machines (‘engins’). From the very origins of humanity there is a mutuality, co-belonging of humans and things, a ‘transcendental constitution of the object by the subject’ and a ‘symmetrical constitution of the subject by the object’ recurring in ‘dizzying semi-cycles endlessly renewed’ (S 209/St 119).[10] It is things that make the humans who make things, long before the petrified modern division between subjects and objects.
The paradigmatic instance of the cadaverous object in Statues is the sacrificial victim, the corpse that substitutes for the living, representing the community to itself: ‘the word “victim” signifies substitution, precisely. Of the same origin as “vice versa,” “vice-admiral,” “vicar,” or “vicarious” as we have seen, it indicates lieutenancy: who or what is the place-holder; who or what represents’ (S 280/St 160).[11] The victim-object is also the first individual, the first subject, insofar as it stands apart from the anonymous crowd, bearing the guilt of the collective. Before even the emergence of the responsible individual in law, the collective produced subjects in its designation of scapegoats:[12]
This tragic character, in the usual sense as well as in the etymological sense of the word—tragos, in Greek, signifies goat—undergoes the process of individuation, the notorious principle of which can be reduced to this sacrifice, the simple and cruel execution of an envoy. As it manufactures this ‘I’ by assassination, the group becomes ‘we’. (Inc 140, translation altered)
Ce personnage tragique, au sens usuel comme au sens étymologique du mot – tragos, en grec, signifie le bouc –, subit le processus d’individuation, dont le fameux principe se réduit à ce sacrifice, simple et cruelle mise à mort d’un émissaire. En fabriquant, par l’assassinat, ce je, le groupe devient nous. (In 250)
The individual, the hero and the champion all have their origins in this sacrificial victim removed from the collective; the origin of ‘subject’ in the Latin subjectus means ‘someone thrown underneath, trampled, pillaged, stoned, lynched, sacrificed’ (In 251/Inc 140).[13] The first subject (sacrificial victim) becomes the first object (corpse).
In this way, sacrifice is the birth of the logic of substitution that plays an important role in Serres’ pragmatogony. First, the victim substitutes itself for the community. Over time, animal sacrifice substitutes for human sacrifice, vividly captured in the story of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah, and eventually animal sacrifice itself is substituted by the mortuary object, the sarcophagus, pyramid or statue that represent the dead, standing in their place:
Menhir, dolmen, cromlech, cairn, pyramid, tombstones, boxes for the dead imitating my mother the Earth, mute objects, raised statues, or standing ghosts, resurrected from the black box when the shutter falls down that we thought we had closed for ever, cippi, effigies of marble, granite or plaster, bronze, steel, aluminium, composite materials, full, dense, heavy, immobile, masses marking places and indifferent to time, pierced, bored, hollow, become boxes again, empty, light, white, mobile, automobile engines indifferent to places wandering through time, carrying the living. (Inc 24)
Menhir, dolmen, cromlech, cairn, pyramide, pierres tombales, boites aux morts mimant ma mère la Terre, objets muets, statues levées ou revenants debout, ressuscités de la boite noire, quand s’abat le cache que nous avons cru rabattre pour toujours, cippes, effigies de marbre, granit ou plâtre, airain et bronze, acier, aluminium, matériau composite, pleines, denses, lourdes, immobiles, masses marquant les lieux indifférentes au temps, trouées, forées, creuses, redevenues boites, vides, légères, blanches, mobiles, moteurs automobiles errant par le temps indifférents aux lieux, emmenant des vivants. (In 50)
The object is a substitute for the sacrificial corpse, itself a substitute for the living community. Serres sees a further substitution depicted in Corneille’s Horace: the moment when the eponymous Roman is put on trial for the murder of his sister is a turning point at which ‘the search for meaning now substitutes for the victims’ blood’, and language, law and judicial process stand in the place of the corpse. Elsewhere, Serres similarly claims that the lifeless body, itself aneconomic, ‘founds, cognitively speaking, the object as such that can eventually become a currency of exchange’ (At 232).[14] Communities, individuals, subjects, objects, language and exchange relations are linked in a ‘chain of substitutions’ (S 306/St 175). Here we see Serres once more jumping nimbly over the ditch dug by modernity separating matter from language, as he substitutes information for the object. The story of the relations between the ‘hard’ and the ‘soft’ is one of substitutions that tightly intertwine the categories modernity seeks to separate.
Notes
[1] ‘il fut un temps où la philosophie eut à descendre du ciel sur la terre […] Voici venir le temps où la philosophie doit descendre du sujet dans les choses.’
[2] The term is coined by Steven Connor in his paper ‘Thinking Things’, an extended version of a plenary lecture given at the 9th annual conference of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), Aarhus, Denmark, 25 August 2008 and as the Textual Practice lecture, University of Sussex, 14 October 2009, available at http://www.stevenconnor.com/thinkingthings/. Useful overviews of different aspects of the recent thingly turn include Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds.), The Speculative Turn: Continental Realism and Materialism (Melbourne: re.press, 2011); Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds.), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Bill Brown (ed.), Critical Inquiry 28:1 (2001), special edition: Things; Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (eds.), New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012); Peter Gratton, Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (London, Bloomsbury: 2014); John Reader, Theology and New Materialism: Spaces of Faithful Dissent (Dordrecht: Springer, 2017).
[3] Like so much of Serres’s work, pragmatogony has been taken up and developed by Bruno Latour. See Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), and ‘Pragmatogonies: A Mythical Account of How Humans and Nonhumans Swap Properties’, American Behavioral Scientist 37:6 (May 1994) 791–808. The term has also received isolated treatment further afield. See for instance C. S. De Beer, ‘Pragmatogony: the impact of things on humans’, Phronimon 11:2 (2010) 5-17.
[4] Bruno Latour, ‘The force and reason of experiment’, in H.E. Le Grand (ed.), Experimental Inquiries: Historical, Philosophical and Social Studies of Experimentation in Science (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012) 49-80, 74.
[5] See Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry 30:2 (2004) 225-248.
[6] ‘non seulement de l’outil ou de la statue belle mais de la chose en général, ontologiquement parlant’.
[7] ‘L’événement le plus révolutionnaire dans l’histoire des hommes, et, peut-être, l’évolution des hominiens, fut moins, je crois, l’accession à l’abstrait ou à la généralité, dans et par le langage, qu’un arrachement par rapport à l’ensemble des relations que nous entretenons dans la famille, le groupe, etc., et ne concernant qu’eux et nous, aboutissant à un accord, peut-être confus, mais, soudain, spécifique, au sujet d’une chose extérieure à cet ensemble.’
[8] The principle here is articulated by Serres in The Birth of Physics: ‘if there were only one season
there would no seasons, if there were only one era there would be no eras, if there were only one island certainly there would be no island’ (BOP 146); ‘s’il n’y avait qu’une saison, il ; n’y aurait pas de saison, s’il n ’y avait qu’une ère, il n ’y aurait pas d ’ère, s’il n ’y avait qu’une île, voici qu’il n ’y aurait pas d’île’ (NP 180). If there is only the collective, there is no collective.
[9] ‘l’objectivation croissante de nos relations intersubjectives’.
[10] ‘J’imagine, à l’origine, un tourbillon rapide où la constitution transcendantale de l’objet par le sujet s’alimenterait, comme en retour, de la constitution, symétrique, du sujet par l’objet, en semi-cycles foudroyants et sans cesse repris, revenant à l’origine’.
[11] ‘le mot victime signifie la substitution, justement. De la même origine que vice versa ou vice-amiral, vicaire ou vicariant, on l’a vu, il indique la .lieutenance : qui ou ce qui tient lieu, celui ou ce qui représente’.
[12] Serres draws heavily on the work of his friend René Girard for his account of the scapegoat. He is characteristically light on referring to Girard by name, but he treats the Girardian themes of violence, mimetism and/or the scapegoat at some length in in Musique, Le Parasite, Récits d’humanisme, Le Tragique et la pitié, La Guerre mondiale, Atlas, Hermès V: le Passage du Nord-Ouest, and Carpaccio : les esclaves libérés.
[13] ‘quelqu’un jeté dessous, piétiné, saccagé, lapidé, lynché, sacrifié’.
[14] ‘fonde, cognitivement, l’objet comme tel, qui, éventuellement, peut devenir monnaie d’échange’.