This is the seventh 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 Six of Michel Serres: Figures of Thought, entitled ‘Ecology’
We have transformed or exploited the world enough, the time is coming to understand it.[1]
Michel Serres, Atlas
The final three chapters of this book present a roughly chronological sweep through Serres’ work, starting with the books of the 1970s and early 1980s which introduce and elaborate his concern for language,[2] through the 1980s when he produces his major contributions to thinking about objects,[3] and finally to the more recent foregrounding of ecological concerns.[4] In this final chapter we shall see how Serres’ ecological thinking both echoes some of the themes and figures of thought encountered in previous chapters, and also further develops and extends the political dimension of his writing.
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’[5] 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).[6] 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).[7]
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.
Among the scandalously sparse secondary literature on Serres in general, ecology is one of the themes that has received a comparatively thorough treatment. One of the main themes in discussions of Serres as an ecological thinker has been precisely the distinction he draws in the quotation above, between a broad sense of ‘ecology’ as general interconnectedness of all knowledge and all fields of inquiry, and a more specific sense pertaining to the ‘natural’ world.[8] This distinction is brought into play by Sydney Lévy in his introduction to a special edition of the journal SubStance on Serres’ ecological thinking in 1997.[9] Lévy frames his understanding of ‘ecology’ in terms of a Serresian Interdisciplinarity tracing ‘local, tenuous, perilous’ North-west passages between different fields.[10] Of particular note in the special edition is Paul A. Harris’ ‘The Itinerant Theorist: Nature and Knowledge/Ecology and Topology in Michel Serres’, in which Harris elegantly articulates the broader and narrower senses of ecology in his contention that ‘Serres attempts to evoke an intimate, visceral knowledge of nature in order to redefine the nature of knowledge’[11] in what he terms a Serresian ‘cultural ecology’.[12] Both the natural world and the universe of knowledge are to be thought, analogously, as complex open systems of interconnection that do not sacrifice the empirical and material on the altar of the general and abstract.
In her 2003 doctoral thesis Stephanie Posthumus once more discusses the relation between the broader and narrower senses of ecology,[13] unfolding the broader sense through careful studies of the motifs of structures[14] and networks (réseaux)[15] in Serres’ thought and arguing that the author of The Natural Contract is elaborating his eco-philosophy (in the narrower sense) in terms of his ‘interconnected vision of the world’,[16] all the while refusing to identify with narrowly ecological concerns.[17] In the 2007 article ‘Translating Ecocriticism: Dialoguing with Michel Serres’[18] and the 2011 ‘Vers une écocritique française : le contrat naturel de Michel Serres’[19] she once more insists upon the broad sense of ‘ecology’, arguing that ‘Serres’ work is ecological in the sense that it makes connections across space and time, across literature and science, across matter and thought’,[20] using Serres’ insights to shine a light on some of the shortcomings of Anglophone ecocriticism in relation to the five themes of ecology, science, nature, language and humanity. Serres offers ‘exactly what a new generation of ecocritics has been looking for as a way to combine both an urbancare and earthcare politics’,[21] and the natural contract provides ecocriticism with a much-needed ecological politics.[22] More recently, Keith Moser has returned to ecological themes in Serres, underlining once more the prescience of his engagement with questions of the natural world in the 1980s,[23] and the importance of understanding Serresian ecology as a broad, interdisciplinary disposition and not a narrow environmental set of concerns.[24]
The current chapter builds on these discussions of Serres’ ecological thought by bringing some of his more recent texts into dialogue with books in the more established Serresian ecological corpus such as Le Contrat naturel and Biogée. This fresh material leads us both to affirm and challenge the existing treatments of Serres and ecology. We shall see how Serres demands that we reject the idea of ecology as a set of distinctive disciplinary concerns and that we understand it instead as an expression of a global intuition, embracing a ‘general ecology’ that describes sets of relations and passages that connect everything to everything else. This is in line with Serres’ own insistence, from Le Système de Leibniz onwards, on the isomorphic inter-relatedness of all things. We shall see that this is not an easy or unproblematic route to travel, and that it brings together behaviours and phenomena that ecological thinking customarily strives to separate, as well as showing the paradigm of ecology as ‘conservation’ and ‘protection’ to be bankrupt and self-undermining. The chapter closes with a consideration of how general ecology can reframeour approach to environmental questions.
Who thinks ecologically?
Much ecological thought floats on a sea of unexamined assumptions that situate it in an unmistakable cultural context, usually post-Romantic, almost always Western, set against this or that Western philosopher—usually Descartes or Heidegger—while always working within the Western tradition of analysis and critique. One of the great virtues of Serres’ thought, by contrast, is that it is set in a context much broader than the Western philosophy of the last four hundred years, and so it provides us with valuable insights into a very important yet infrequently posed question: ‘who are we, who seek to think ecologically?’ It is a question—and not for the last time in this chapter—that pushes past the ‘how?’ to the ‘why?’: why is it that ecology has become a major theme in recent thought? To read Serres is to go beyond the question of how we ‘protect’ our ‘environment’ to ask why we find ourselves as those for whom ‘protection’ and ‘environment’ (as well as ‘we’ and ‘our’) assert themselves as the categories in terms of which these questions should be thought in the first place. For Serres, to insist on this deeper question is to tell the story of the end of the Neolithic period and of how we became acosmic.
The end of the Neolithic
What counts as sufficient historical context for situating current ecological concerns? The technological advances of the twentieth century? The Industrial Revolution and the Romanticism of the nineteenth? Early modern rationalism and Descartes’ insistence that we are ‘masters and possessors‘ of nature? The rise of Christianity in the West, with God’s injunction to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1 to ‘have dominion‘ over the Garden of Eden and its animals? For Serres, though each of these moments holds some merit in answering the question ‘who are we, who seek to think ecologically?‘ they are overshadowed by a recent historical change that overturns a pattern of human behaviour fully ten thousand years old. All developments in the ancient, early modern and modern periods are dwarfed by the epochal shift that is currently taking place: humanity is now leaving the Neolithic (In 365/Inc 207). As with his pragmatogony, Serres begins his genealogy of ecological concerns (his oikogony, perhaps) in prehistory.
The salient events of the Neolithic age[25] for Serres are 1) the birth of biotechnology with the ‘invention’ of maize through the selective breeding of teosinte, an ancestor of modern wheat (Hom 18), allowing for a greater calorific yield per seed sown, and the domestication and breeding of animals, all of which made possible 2) the transition from a nomadic existence of hunting and gathering to a settled, agricultural life and the rise of permanent dwellings, villages, towns and cities. These related changes created a pattern of human existence that lasted until the twentieth century, transforming humanity’s relation to space, the body, science, reason, religion, culture and social life (Hom 110, See also MP 34/Mal 22, Pan 270-1). Compared to this Neolithic revolution, the ecological impact of Christianity, Descartes and the Romantics barely registers.
We are living today, Serres argues, through the greatest transformation since the Neolithic Revolution, for ‘[t]he greatest event of the twentieth century incontestably remains the disappearance of agricultural activity at the helm of human life in general and of individual cultures’ (CN 53/NC 28).[26] The statistics are striking. At the turn of the twentieth century around half the population of Western countries was involved, directly or indirectly, in arable or livestock farming, a practice established in the Neolithic period. In France, by 1980 the figure was 8.3% and by 2000 it was 3.3%. If we can judge the significance of a social change, at least in part, by the longevity of the tradition it overturns, then we have witnessed over the last century the most important transformation to the conditions of human existence in the last ten thousand years (Pan 270). It is these relatively recent developments that condition our understanding of ecological issues today.
With the end of the Neolithic, we have lost the world. It has become for us the excluded third joining together what, without it, resolve to the poles of subject and object, same and other, like the middle section of the serpent in La Fontaine’s parable ‘The Countryman and the Serpent’ in The Parasite. This is nowhere more vividly illustrated than in Serres’ comments on Francisco Goya’s Men with Sticks: ‘there are two combatants, and once one of them wins there will be no more uncertainty. But we can identify a third position, outside their squabble: the marsh into which the struggle is sinking’ (CN 13-14/NC 1).[27] As Serres incredulously asks in relation to Hegel’s famous dialectic of the master and the slave, ‘Does anyone ever say where the master and the slave fight it out? Our culture abhors the world’ (CN 16/NC 3).[28] Throughout recorded history and climaxing with the end of the Neolithic, the world has become an increasingly excluded irrelevance to our exclusively social concerns. So we fail to understand that the events of Oedipus the King are set in course as much by an epidemic as by any human action (PCDS2 17-8), and when battle and disease both sweep through a country we have little hesitation in deciding which was the more important event (PCDS1 284). ‘Perhaps one day we will be told what the Roman armies owed to pernicious germs for their victories, their conquests and the huge numbers of dead that preceded their advance’ (R 257/Ro 173, translation altered).[29]
One of the salient consequences of the recent end of the Neolithic agricultural society is that our relationship with space has changed. It is common to cite statistics of urban expansion and the gradual diminution of rural and greenbelt land since the Industrial Revolution, but for Serres this misses the point because the countryside has, in fact, completely disappeared. The time previously needed to travel within a large city is now – thanks to high-speed trains and air travel – sufficient to move from one end of the country to another through what used to be the countryside, with the result that ‘the entire country is transformed into a housing estate, the motorways are its roads and the TGV tracks its metro’ (H 153n, 159).[30] Former farms are bought up as second homes and country retreats for city dwellers, rural dialects are standardised by the daily pedagogy of national and international broadcast media. Trees and rivers may remain, but the countryside as a place of cultural and natural resistance to the urban is no more, and we are free to ‘arrange the world for ourselves alone, now exclusively political animals, inexorable winners of the war of survival, enclosed forever in the city built without limits, coextensive with the planet’ (TI 179/TK 116-7).[31] In short, ‘[n]ature according to the Moderns is reduced to human nature, which itself is reduced to reason. The world no longer has any place there’ (Pan 244).[32] Like the Bachelardian laboratory that, for Serres, fills the whole of Bachelard’s reality and banishes experience completely (H2 72), so also the current generation has lost all connection to the land and become ‘exclusively political’ (OG 167/G 197). It is hardly surprising, then, given that philosophy is predominantly written by these same city-dwellers, and that ‘the most forgotten, despised and neglected of all philosophy’s standard objects, for at least half a century, has been the world’ (H5 100).[33] Having denatured and conquered the countryside by overlaying it with an extended polis, the urbanites then complete their colonisation and add insult to injury by resurrecting it as the limp, needy, anaemic object of their miserly ecological ministrations: ‘I consider ecological ideologies to be the umpteenth instance of the city and city dwellers’ trans-historical victory over the fields and the woods’ (Ec 208/C 143).[34]
Even the appearance of the countryside has become urban. Its meandering hedgerows, copses and waterlogged meadows have been overwritten by the geometric fields and industrial means of cultivation that mirror the drive for optimisation in urban capitalism, flattening its idiosyncratic wrinkles with an injection of urban Botox (H 158). The excess and redundancy of the countryside has been flattened and simplified in order to make way for the Cartesian space necessary for the urban paradigm of universal exchange (H 156), its time no longer governed by the rhythms and changes of nature but by the formatted precision of the urban clock. We have lost any experience of the countryside, the sound of cows lowing, the smell of dung, the taste of a tomato or a peach (P 186/Par 141). In sum, everything that set rural culture aside from the urban has been smoothed away, and modern Western countries now function as large cities. Whatever pockets of countryside may yet remain become, in this new economy of space, a place of banishment (the etymology of the French term banlieue: suburb) and a non-place of exclusion defined by its peripheral relationship to the city. The non-urban has become the profane wasteland outside the sacred walls of the city, or what Serres calls ‘culture’s hell’ (CN 118/NC 73).
If this were all that Serres had to say about the transformations of the last century then we might be forgiven for thinking that our exit from the Neolithic resembled a return to pre-Neolithic nomadism. After all, with modern transport networks we are much more mobile than the immediately preceding generations, moving between districts, cities, countries and continents in search of work and pleasure. Serres notes that he has lived the life of a global nomad, spending periods of time in Brest, Toulon, Clermont, Vincennes, Seoul, Tokyo, Melbourne, Brisbane, Baltimore, Stanford, Montreal, Buffalo, Djibouti and Bamako (RH 105). But to limit his insights in this way would be fundamentally to misunderstand the significance of his argument, for we have left the Neolithic not for a warmed-over nomadism but for a different sort of space altogether. We who think ecologically today have become acosmic.
Notes
[1] ‘nous avons assez transformé ou exploité le monde, le temps vient de le comprendre’.
[2] Hermès II: L’interférence (1972), La Naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce: Fleuves et turbulences (1977), Hermès IV: La distribution (1977), Genèse (1982) and Les Cinq sens (1985).
[3] Rome: Le livre des fondations (1983), Statues: Le second livre des fondations (1987), Le Parasite (1980).
[4] Détachement (1983), Le Contrat naturel (1990), Le Mal Propre : Polluer pour s’approprier (2008), La Guerre mondiale (2008), Biogée : Mer et fleuve, Terre et monts, Trois volcans, Vents et météores, Faune et flore, Rencontres, Amours (2010) and Habiter (2011). The other major Serresian theme of recent years is the human, addressed in a series of four volumes written in the 2000s: Hominescence (2001), L’Incandescent (2003), Rameaux (2004), and Récits d’Humanisme (2006). I address the theme of the human in Serres’s thought in the fifth chapter of French Philosophy Today (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).
[5] ‘le commencement de toute écologie’. Jean-Marie Auzias, Michel Serres, philosophe occitan (Lyon: Fédérop/Jorn, 1992) 9.
[6] ‘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’.
[7] ‘Question : que voulons-nous, en amont, lorsque nous salissons le monde?’, emphasis original.
[8] Serres draws this distinction himself in the UNESCO lecture entitled ‘Retour au contrat naturel’, contrasting the broad sense of ‘a scientific discipline dedicated to the study of larger or smaller sets of living things interacting between themselves and with their milieu’ [‘une discipline scientifique, adonnée à l’étude d’ensembles, plus ou moins nombreux, de vivants interagissant entre eux et avec leur milieu’] with the narrower meaning ‘from ideology and politics, of doctrine that varies according to individuals and groups that hold it, that aims at the protection of the environment, though through diverse means that are often contested by its opponents’ [‘idéologique et politique, d’une doctrine variable selon les auteurs et les groupes et visant, par des moyens divers et contestés souvent par ses adversaires, à la protection de l’environnement’] (RCNslp 171-2).
[9] Sydney Lévy, ‘An Ecology of Knowledge: Michel Serres,’ in SubStance 26:2 (1997) 3-5.
[10] Lévy, ‘An Ecology of Knowledge’ 3.
[11] Paul A. Harris, ‘The Itinerant Theorist: Nature and Knowledge/Ecology and Topology in Michel Serres,’ in SubStance 26:2 (1997) 39.
[12] Harris, ‘The Itinerant Theorist’ 44.
[13] Stephanie Posthumus, ‘La nature et l’écologie chez Levi-Strauss, Tournier, Serres’, Ph.D., The University of Western Ontario (Canada), 2003.
[14] Posthumus, ‘La nature et l’écologie’ 73-103.
[15] Posthumus, ‘La nature et l’écologie’ 189-202.
[16] Posthumus, ‘La nature et l’écologie’ 197.
[17] Posthumus, ‘La nature et l’écologie’ 224.
[18] Stephanie Posthumus, ‘Translating Ecocriticism: Dialoguing with Michel Serres,’ in Reconstruction 7:2 (2007), available at: http://reconstruction.eserver.org/Issues/072/posthumus.shtml.
[19] Stephanie Posthumus, ‘Vers une écocritique française : le contrat naturel de Michel Serres,’ Mosaic 44:2 (2011) 85-100.
[20] Posthumus, ‘Translating Ecocriticism’ ¶ 8.
[21] Posthumus, ‘Translating Ecocriticism’ ¶ 12.
[22] Posthumus, ‘Vers une écocritique française 90.
[23] Keith Moser, The Encyclopedic Philosophy of Michel Serres: Writing the Modern World and Anticipating the Future (Augusta, GA: Anaphora Literary Press, 2016) 60, 70.
[24] Moser, The Encyclopedic Philosophy of Michel Serres 78.
[25] There are no universal dates for the beginning and end of the Neolithic period because agriculture and the domestication of animals developed at different times in different parts of the globe. In the Near East the period is commonly thought to begin around 9000 BC, and finishes in Europe between 7000 (Southern Europe) and 4000 (northern Europe) BC.
[26] ‘[l]e plus grand événement du xxe siècle reste sans conteste la disparition de l’agriculture comme activité pilote de la vie humaine en général et des cultures singulières’.
[27] ‘il y a seulement deux combattants que la victoire, sans plus de doute, départagera. Mais en tierce position, extérieure à leur chamaille, nous repérons un troisième lieu, le marécage, où la lutte s’envase’.
[28] ‘Qui dit jamais où se battent le maître et l’esclave? Notre culture a horreur du monde’.
[29] ‘Peut-être dira-t-on un jour ce que les armées romaines ont dû aux germes pernicieux pour leurs victoires, leurs conquêtes, et le nombre immense des morts devant leur avancée.’
[30] ‘le pays tout entier se transforme en une cité dont les autoroutes sont des rues et les TGV des lignes de métro’. The TGV, ‘train à grande vitesse’, is the high-speed train running between major French cities.
[31] ‘Nous aménageons le monde pour nous seuls, animaux désormais exclusivement politiques, inexorables, gagnants de la lutte pour la survie, enfermés à jamais dans la ville bâtie sans limite, coextensive à la planète’.
[32] ‘La nature des Modernes se réduit à la nature humaine, laquelle se réduit à la raison. Le monde n’y a plus sa place.’
[33] ‘Le plus oublié, le plus méprisé, le plus délaissé des objets usuels de la philosophie, depuis au moins un demi-siècle, est le Monde’.
[34] ‘je tiens les idéologies écologiques pour la énième manifestation de la victoire tram-historique de la ville ou des bourgeois sur les champs et les bois’.
