Abbreviations
CN Le Contrat naturel
Bi Biogée
Bio Biogea
GB Le Gaucher boiteux
Hom Hominescence
In L’Incandescent
Inc The Incandescent
NC The Natural Contract
P Le Parasite
Par The Parasite
RH Récits d’humanisme
TDC Temps des crises
TOC Times of Crisis
TU ‘Temps, usure : feux et signaux de brume’
In the previous post in this mini-series I argued that a natural contact of the sort that Michel Serres proposes can help us to address the climate crisis by harnessing modernity’s prejudices and blind spots in the very attempt to overcome them. I now want to continue that line of thought by addressing some of the most common objections to the natural contract. All the objections are related, and they all try to cleave apart the social from the natural, the human from the non-human.
Objection 1: The natural world cannot sign a contract.
One major objection is that the natural world could never enter into a legal contract. Who, or what, could possibly sign such an agreement?
A first response to this objection is to point out that the problem it raises is not limited to the natural contract alone. Who signed the social contract? What sort of human being – pre-socialised, missing the societal infrastructure necessary for the development of language and, in some theories of the social contract, lacking the rationality that only life in community can bring – could possibly have entered into the contract? Of the social contract, Serres writes:
When, how, why this contract was – or was not – signed, we do not know and will doubtless never know. What does it matter?
Since that legendary time, we have multiplied the number of legal contracts. We can’t decide whether these contracts were established on the model of the first one, or whether we imagine the fiction of the originary contract on the model of the standard contracts settled by our laws. Again, what does it matter? (NC, 44-5)[1]
The social contract’s obscure origins do not hamstring the validity of contemporary legal contracts any more than an obscure etymology makes a word un-usable in everyday discourse. The power of the contract is not anchored in in its moment of institution, but in the tacit way in which it structures assumptions and expectations in the present. Similarly, the value of a natural contract is not in our being able to frame and display a photograph of its signing ceremony, but in the way that it can help shape our “global intuition” of ourselves and of the world.
This response goes some way to addressing the problems inherent in the idea that the natural world is party to a contract, but three crucial steps in the argument remain.
For more posts on rewriting the social contract, please click here.
Objection 2: The natural world cannot negotiate the contract, or even speak.
The next step is to deal with the objection that the natural world has no intention, no agency, no language and no memory, all of which renders it incapable of negotiating or entering into a contract. To what terms can it be held? To what can it hold us? How can the “natural contract” be anything but a romantic, fanciful notion for poets and dreamers?
In order to understand why this objection fails to grasp what Serres’s natural contract is, we need to take a short detour via his account of writing. When Serres talks about ‘nature writing’, he does not only mean ‘writing about nature’, but ‘writing by nature’. In Biogea (2010), for example, he can claim not only that he thinks about the world, but that he thinks like the world (Bi 159/Bio 187): ‘Coded-coding, each thing reverberates in every other thing, coding-coded’ Bi 114/Bio 131),[i] humans included (TDC 61/TOC 34). This coding, furthermore, inheres in the processes of nature absent any human intervention:
Made up of letters, figures or notes in long sequences, the multiply folded chains of acids and proteins transcribe and translate themselves by themselves, without our intervention. There is no need for us to discover mathematical language, it inhabits the very intestines of the thing; it does not describe or explain these new objects from the outside, but rather constitutes them, present in their innermost part.[2]
Light, wind, rain, chemical reactions, yews and sperm whales (Bi 147/Bio 172), crystals, stellar colours, radioactivity, biochemistry, rocks, glaciers, DNA, the Big Bang: in example after example the world is not merely written, it knows how to write: ‘Inert or living, the universe speaks as we do, writes as we do, talks and expresses itself as we do, creates data banks, remembers, translates and even sometimes makes mistakes or lies, though rarely’ (RH 80).[ii] This writing, furthermore, forms a story, providing an econarratology in what Serres calls the Great Story (grand récit): ‘the Universe, the Earth and life know how to tell the story of their origins, to speak of their evolution, slowing the contingent bifurcations of their time and sometimes giving a glimpse of the period of their disappearance’ (RH 80).[iii]
So what relation does human language have to this cacophony? It is an extension of, and participation in it: ‘We perceive and know the world in the same way that the world perceives itself and knows itself. The background noise of my body hears the background noise of the world: harmony, anharmony disharmony?’ (TU 212).[iv] The world opens itself to me (mundus patet) and I to the world (ego pateo): ‘interfering, we both vibrate together, like the canvas of the tent and the wind, with fear, with emotions, with similar movements’ (Bi 100-1/Bio 114).[v] I do not simply think about rivers; I think like a river (Bi 27/Bio 23) or like the sea (Bi 29, 79/Bio 26, 88), like the earth and like a mountain (Bi 32/Bio 29). Writing is not something estranged from the processes of the natural world; it participates in those processes: ‘Work flows from me like honey, like the spider’s web […] I am a bee or a spider, a tree. I no longer can tell the difference between work and secretion’ (P 118/Par 86-7).[vi]
My little stories are part of the universe’s big story, not as an imitation of it from the outside but as a participation in it from the inside: ‘The speaking subject mingles its sound with those of resonant objects. I write like light, crystal or a stream; I tell my story like the world’ (RH 80).[vii] This is why ‘[w]e are in want of a general theory of marks, traces and signals to go with the physics of forces, to teach us to remember the world and remember as it does, to write on it and like it’ (In 73/Inc 36, CW’s emphasis).[viii] This is not an account of mimetic representation, but of methectic collaboration: ‘I think, therefore I mimic? No, rather I plunge into its Story, the powerful dynamism of which shows me how to invent, step by step’ (GB 10).[ix]
So human thinking, human writing, human contracting, are not sui generis operations with no equivalent in the natural world. They are particular instances of broader phenomena the diversity of which always overflows these particular, human examples:
What language do the things of the world speak, that we might come to an understanding with them, contractually? But, after all, the old social contract, too, was unspoken and unwritten: no one has ever read the original, or even a copy. To be sure, we don’t know the world’s language, or rather we know only the various animistic, religious, or mathematical versions of it. (NC, 39)[3]
Humans participate in the patterns of nature, patterns that in a human frame are called “thinking” and “writing”. The world speaks in its way, just as humans speak in theirs.
Objection 3: the natural world cannot enter into an agreement of mutual constraints and benefits.
Even if it is conceded that the rhythms of the natural world are species of the same genus as human speaking and writing rather than romantic extensions of “speaking” and “writing” into a natural world where they do not belong, it may still be objected that nature cannot strike an agreement as would be required in the terms of a contract. The natural world cannot abide by a legal code, nor can it be held to account for breaking a contract. Serres begs to differ:
When physics was invented, philosophers went around saying that nature was hidden under the code of algebra’s numbers and letters: that word code came from law.
In fact, the Earth speaks to us in terms of forces, bonds, and interactions, and that’s enough to make a contract. Each of the partners in symbiosis thus owes, by rights, life to the other, on pain of death. (NC, 39)[4]
If the world codes information (see objection 2), then it finds itself already in the realm of law. Not human, codified statutes, to be sure, but to take human law as the zero degree measure of all law is to perpetuate the fallacy of Goya’s pugilists or of Armande in Molière’s Les Femmes savantes, fancying that her coterie of acquaintances is the fount of all wisdom: ‘No one will have wit except us or our friends’.[x] To boast that ‘no-one will have contracts except humans and their kind’ is just as ripe for parody as Molière’s self-congratulatory intellectual imposters.
We speak, do we not, of “laws of nature”, and not without warrant. The constraint under which I am placed by gravity is just as real, tangible and immediate as any legal statute. My inability to live underwater or without water are no more opaque to me – a good deal less, in fact – than my chances of getting away with murder. The natural world has its conditions that must be met if a settlement of mutual benefit is to be reached, without any need to be ventriloquized by human lips. Nor is it hard to understand what a settlement of mutual benefit between humanity and the world would look like, without any recourse for romanticised notions of “mother nature” or Gaia, both of which Serres treats with the utmost suspicion. The avoidance of human-caused extinctions and habitat destructions is a good place to start, and none of this requires tree-hugging, animism or nature worship. It is a reasonable extension of the principles and assumptions about interests and accommodations that govern human, legal contracts.
Objection 4: A contract is an exclusively human artefact.
The fourth objection is that a contract is a human artefact that exists within societies advanced enough to sustain systems of law, and cannot be fancifully projected onto a natural world that knows nothing of contractual obligation.
The Serresian response to this objection can be inferred from the response to Objection 2 above. Its false assumption is to suppose, self-aggrandizingly, that human contracts are sui generis in the first place, appearing ex nihilo in the history of the universe, rather than adaptations of, and participations in, patterns of behaviour and activity that pre-date them. From Serres’s point of view the contract is but one instance of a drawing-together that is seen everywhere in the natural world:
Gaius says somewhere that every obligation is born of a contract or a fault. If, in the term obligation, we read a bond that brings together or that subjects, we shouldn’t hesitate to see, at the origin of the term contract, a similar cord that draws or tracts us together. Thus the theory of the social contract only repeats, tautologically, the necessity of collective connections: bond to bond. (NC, 59)[5]
There is no necessity for such a contract to be written; contracts in writing are one species of a broader genus of relationship:
The term contract originally means the tract or trait or draft that tightens and pulls: a set of cords assures, without language, the subtle system of constraints and freedoms through which each linked element receives information about every other and about the system, and draws security from all. (NC, 103)[6]
Human, legal contracts participate in, but do not act as the single model for, this broader category.
As I argued in the previous post in this series, these thoughts are not intended to fit comfortably into our common-sense view of the world. It is such a common sense view, along with its assumptions about the hermetic division between the natural and the cultural, the human and the non-human that, in Serres’s eyes, is largely to blame for the ecological crisis we currently face. Serres wants his arguments about language in nature, about the ubiquity of contracts in the world, and about the possibility of a settlement of mutual constraint and benefit between humanity and the world, to challenge and change our global intuition so that we stop relating to the world as its parasites and start seeing ourselves as its symbiotes. Such a transformation is neither superficial nor straightforward; it requires vigorous shocks to our assumptions and expectations of the sort issued by the natural contract.
Photo by Martin Damboldt from Pexels
[1] “Quand, comment, pourquoi ce contrat fut-il — ou non — signé, nous ne le savons pas et ne le saurons sans doute jamais. Qu’importe.
Depuis ce temps fabuleux, nous avons multiplié les contrats, de type juridique. Nous ne pouvons pas décider si ceux-ci furent établis sur le modèle du premier, ou si, au contraire, nous imaginons la fiction de l’originaire sur le modèle des contrats usuels fixés par nos droits. Qu’importe à nouveau.” (CN, 76).
[2] Formés de lettres, de chiffres ou de notes en longues séquences, les rubans multiplement ployés des acides et des protéines se transcrivent et se traduisent d’eux-mêmes sans notre intervention. Nous n’avons point à découvrir le langage mathématique, il gît dans les entrailles mêmes de la chose ; il ne décrit ni n’explique ces nouveaux objets de l’extérieur, mais, présent dans leur intimité, il les constitue. (Hom 95)
[3] “Dans quel langage parlent les choses du monde pour que nous puissions nous entendre avec elles, par contrat ? Mais, après tout, le vieux contrat social, aussi, restait non dit et non écrit : nul n’en a jamais lu ni l’original ni même une copie. Certes, nous ignorons la langue du monde, ou nous ne connaissons d’elle que les diverses versions animiste, religieuse ou mathématique.” (CN, 69)
[4] “Quand fut inventée la physique, les philosophes allaient disant que la nature se cachait sous le code des nombres ou les lettres de l’algèbre : ce mot de code venait du droit.
En fait, la Terre nous parle en termes de forces, de liens et d’interactions, et cela suffit à faire un contrat. Chacun des partenaires en symbiose doit donc, de droit, à l’autre la vie sous peine de mort.” (CN, 69)
[5] “Gaius dit quelque part que toute obligation naît d’un contrat ou d’une faute. Si nous lisons dans le premier terme un lien qui rassemble ou assujettit, n’hésitons point à voir à l’origine du second une corde semblable qui nous tire ou tracte ensemble. Donc la théorie du contrat social ne fait que répéter, tautologiquement, la nécessité des liaisons collectives : d’un lien l’autre.” (CN, 99)
[6] “Le terme contrat signifie originellement le trait qui serre et tire : un jeu de cordes assure, sans langage, ce système souple de contraintes et de libertés par lequel chaque élément lié reçoit de l’information sur chacun et sur le système, ainsi que de la sécurité de tous.” (CN, 163).
[i] ‘Codante-codée, chaque chose retentit à toute autre chose, codée-codante’.
[ii] ‘Inerte ou vivant, l’univers parle comme nous, écrit comme nous, dit et s’exprime comme nous, crée des banques de données, se souvient, traduit, et même parfois, mutant, erre ou ment, mais rarement’.
[iii] ‘L’Univers, la Terre et la vie savent raconter leur origine, disent leur évolution, relatent les bifurcations contingentes de leur temps et laissent entrevoir parfois, l’ère de leur disparition’.
[iv] ‘Nous percevons et connaissons le monde à la mode même où le monde s’auto-perçoit et s’auto-connaît. Le bruit de fond de mon corps entend le bruit de fond du monde : harmonie, anharmonie, dysharmonie ?’
[v] ‘Interférant, nous vibrons tous deux ensemble, comme la toile de tente et le vent, de peur, d’émotions, de mouvements semblables’.
[vi] ‘L’œuvre, tout à l’heure, coule de moi comme du miel, comme le fil de l’araignée […] Je suis une abeille ou une araignée, un arbre. Je ne vois plus la différence entre l’œuvre et la sécrétion’.
[vii] ‘Le sujet parlant mêle son bruit à celui des objets résonnants. J’écris comme lumière, cristal ou ruisseau ; je me raconte comme le monde’.
[viii] ‘il nous manque une théorie générale des marques, des traces et des signaux pour apprendre à nous souvenir comme le monde et de lui, pour écrire comme lui et sur lui’
[ix] ‘Je pense, donc je le mime? Non, je plonge plutôt en son Récit, dont le dynamisme puissant me montre, pas à pas, comment inventer’.
[x] ‘Nul n’aura de l’esprit, hors nous et nos amis’, Molière, Les Femmes savantes (1672), III, 2.
