Michel Serres Quotes

only philosophy can go deep enough to show that literature goes still deeper than philosophy

The skin is a variety of contingency: in it, through it, with it, the world and my body touch each other, the feeling and the felt, it defines their common edge. Contingency means common tangency: in it the world and the body intersect and caress each other. I do not wish to call the place in which I live a medium, I prefer to say that things mingle with each other and that I am no exception to that. I mix with the world which mixes with me. Skin intervenes between several things in the world and makes them mingle.

On peut presque tout faire sans lumière sauf écrire. Ecrire demande des lueurs. Vivre se suffit d’ombre, lire exige la clarté. Fast alles kann man ohne Licht tun, außer Schreiben. Zum Schreiben ist Licht nötig. Zum Leben genügt Dunkelheit; Lesen braucht Helligkeit.

What is the good of power and precision if the price we pay is ugliness and death? What is the good of thinking, if we have no idea how to live?

We no longer live addicted to speech; having lost our senses, now we are going to lose language, too. We will be addicted to data, naturally. Not data that comes from the world, or from language, but encoded data. To know is to inform oneself. Information is becoming our primary and universal addiction.

Now it could be said that he who cheats and deceits does so because he wants to win. So the first attribute of God consists in being indifferent to winning. Detach yourself from notions of winning or losing, be indifferent to victory or loss, you will enter into science, observation, discovery and thought.

Nothing is constructed, made or invented, except in relative peace, in a small, rare pocket of local peace maintained in the middle of the universal devastation produced by perpetual war.

Faced with these mutations, we no doubt need to be invent-ing unimaginable novelties, far outside the obsolete frameworks that still format our behaviors, our medias, and our projects—all of which are being drowned in the society of the spectacle.

We adults have transformed our society of the spectacle into a pedagogical society whose overwhelming competition, willfully ignorant, has eclipsed the school and the university. The media long ago took over the function of teaching— the time when one hears and sees, the time of seduction and consequence.

Gradually, however , knowledge became objectivized, first in scrolls or on pieces of vellum or parchment, which were the supports of writing; then, during the Renaissance, in books made out of paper, which found their support in the printing press; and finally, today, on the web, which is the support of email messages and information

The body receives gratuity. The world gives graciously, disinterestedly, asking for nothing back, expecting nothing in return; it has no scales, no balance sheet. Our senses cede nothing in return for it, can give nothing back to the source of given beauties. What could the eye give back to the sun, or the palate to the vines of Yquem?

Undergo the quiet treatment of the five senses. It is enough to accept what is gratuitously given.

With their cell phone, they have access to all people; with GPS, to all places; with the Internet, to all knowledge. They inhabit a topological space of neighborhoods, whereas we lived in a metric space, coordinated by distances.

¿Qué es el hombre? Un habitante de esta extrañeza, de esta utopía, consagrado a los milagros sobre las islas raras del lenguaje, en la mar de la violencia desencadenada. Su historia corre de lo duro hacia lo blando, en todos los sentidos de esos dos adjetivos, suave como el aceite y los cuidados del samaritano, el genio del médico, delicado como la paz, blando como los signos y la lengua, suave a la inversa de la violencia y de la muerte. Curador. Hablante. Inmortal. Resucitado.

„Die Musik wird aus dem Rauschen geboren: das erste menschliche Lallen, die erste Information im Chaos. Aus seiner Quelle entsprungen, lässt dieser Strom der Arrangements und Kombinationen, der in Melodien und Harmonien zur Sprache hinabfließt, die Negentropie anwachsen.[...]

Qui expérimente ? Le corps. Qui invente ? Lui. Et qui flotte, court et vole, en ivresse archangélique lorsque l’intuition bienheureuse le baigne et le fait léviter ? Le corps, oui, le corps encore. Nu. Confite en logique et en mémoire, toutes deux machinales – laissez-les donc aux machines –, l’intelligence reste bête et lourde sans lui, ailé. Ascension : il vient d’appareiller

Chères Petites Poucettes, chers Petits Poucets, ne le dites pas à vos vieux dont je suis, c’est tellement mieux aujourd’hui: la paix, la longévité, la paix, les antalgiques, la paix, la Sécu, la paix, l’alimentation surveillée, la paix, l’hygiène et les soins palliatifs, la paix, ni service militaire ni peine de mort, la paix, le contrat naturel, la paix, les voyages, la paix, le travail allégé, la paix, les communications partagées, la paix, le gonflement vieilli bouffi des institutions dinosaures...

Sorti de la bibliothèque, il serre sous son bras les trésors empruntés. La lumière des réverbères permet de commencer la lecture dans la rue. La psyché du futur philosophe se nourrit de ce monde inédit, méconnu, inconnu. Camus découvre le formidable pouvoir des mots, la magie de la lecture, l'immense puissance des livres. Rentré chez lui, il pose le volume sur la toile cirée de la table de la cuisine, le place sous le rond de lumière de la lampe à pétrole, l'ouvre et le lit. Le monde autour de lui disparaît; il entre de plain-pied dans un univers qui le sauve. Le livre ramasse le monde des antimondes.

The given - forgive me - what is marketable, is only given - forgive me - is only sold in and through language. [...] Triumphant, the word redeems anything that could lend taste or aroma and transubstantiates it into something seen and read and heard, the channels that are peculiar to it. This - what you eat and drink - is the body and blood of the word. Here - where you buy it - lies the grave of bread and wine, body and blood, dead and resuscitated as messages.

There are objects I seem to live through more than view. I think I pick up noises from them more than I see them, touch them, or conceive them. I hear without clear frontiers, without divining an isolated source, hearing is better at integrating than analyzing, the ear knows how to lose track. By the ear, of course, I hear: temple, drum, pavilion, but also my entire body and the whole of my skin. We are immersed in sound just as we are immersed in air and light... We breathe background noise, the taut and tenuous agitation at the bottom of the world, through all our pores and papillae, we collect within us the noise of organization, a hot flame and dance of integers. My acouphenes, a mad murmur, tense and constant in hearing, speak to me of my ashes, perhaps, the ones whence I came, the ones to which I will return. Background noise is the ground of our perception, absolutely uninterrupted, it is our perennial sustenance, the element of the software of all our logic. It is the residue and the cesspool of our messages.

Why have these innovations not taken place? I hesitate to accuse philosophers (I consider myself to be one of them), although their vocation is to anticipate the knowledges and practices to come, and it seems to me that they have failed in this task. Preoccupied with day-to-day politics, they have not perceived the arrival of the contemporary.

Cogito: my thinking is distinguished from knowledge, and from the various processes of understanding— memory, imagination, deductive reason, discernment, geometry— that have been externalized, along with synapses and neurons, in the computer.

A democracy of knowledge has never existed , not because those who had knowledge possessed power, but because knowledge itself required humiliated bodies, including the bodies of those who possessed knowledge.

Order, though practical and effi-cient, can imprison. Although it promotes movement, in the end it can also freeze movement. The check-list, though es-sential for action, can sterilize discovery. An atmosphere penetrated with disorder, by contrast, is like an apparatus that has a certain play in it, and it is precisely this play that provokes invention.

We need order, certainly, but an order without reason. It is reason that must be changed. The only authentic intellectual act is invention. Our preference should be for the labyrinth of electronic chips.

Every abstract idea brings with it an immense economy of thought.

The space of circulation, a diffuse orality, free movements, the end of classified classes, disparate distributions, the serendipity of invention, the speed of light, the novelty of both subjects and objects, the search for a new reason. . . . The diffusion of knowledge can no longer take place on any campus in the world, which are themselves ordered and formatted by the page, rational in the old manner, imitating the camps of the Roman army. This is the space of thought where Thumbelina, in both her body and her soul, spent her youth.

When the old Ptolemaic model had accumulated so many epicycles that the movement of the stars became complicated and unreadable, a change became necessary. The center of the system was moved toward the sun, and everything became clear again. The written code of Hammurabi no doubt put an end to the socio-juridical difficulties that had arisen in oral law. Our own complexities come from a crisis of writing.

The result may be a realignment of our socio-political landscape by the advent of a fifth power—the power of data—which is independent of the four other powers: legislative, executive, and judicial powers, and the media.

Algorithmic thought arose before the invention of geometry in Greece, and reemerged in Europe with Pascal and Leibniz, who invented two calculating machines and, like Thumbelina, used pseudonyms.

The new victory of these old procedures stems from the fact that the algorithmic and the procedural both rely on codes.

A code resembled a coin with two sides, heads and tails, which were contradictory: both accessible and secret.

Thumbelina, along with her brothers and sisters, is now producing, like a choir, a background noise that drowns out the voice of writing.

It is the end of the era of knowledge.

We have to bring about peace between ourselves to safeguard the world and peace with the world in order to save ourselves.

The soul is a material body, the body is a thing, the subject is just an object, physiology and psychology is just physics. And, consequently, the senses are reliable.

Oserais-je dire que ce moment passé chez Gabriel Liiceanu fut intense ? Sans doute tombait-il à pic pour corriger une impression désastreuse qui guette tout visiteur débarquant à Bucarest. Ce peuple immature et déboussolé, ce cortège de rumeurs et de gaffes, cet « archaïsme » de la Roumanie lobotomisée par son « conducător », tout cela nous inclinerait, pour un peu, à oublier la saisissante densité de la culture et de la littérature roumaines dont mille écrits témoignent. Cette sagesse des catacombes qui, dans ce théâtre de mensonges et de gesticulations, fit de chaque écrivain retiré à l'intérieur de lui-même le vrai «gardien du sens». L'expression est de Michel Serres mais, Liiceanu en convient, elle traduit bien la réalité roumaine. Une réalité enténébrée au-dehors mais sauvée du dedans par ces créateurs ermites, réfugiés hors de la politique imprécatoire.

When I think a given concept, I am entirely this concept, when I think tree, I am the tree, when I think river, I am the river, when I think number, I am through and through and from head to toe, number. that is the unquestionable experience of thinking.

Who am I, beyond the joy coming from this shudder of awakening, the growth of this green ivy, this dancing flame, this living fire?

le fait religieux peut être analysé comme un antidote à la violence. La nouveauté de la pensée de cet auteur lui a valu de devoir se réfugier, comme d'autres spécialistes français des sciences humaines – Paul Ricœur et Michel Serres, par exemple – aux États-Unis pour poursuivre ses recherches, ces sciences étant alors en France exclusivement construites autour du marxisme, du freudisme et du structuralisme.

Qui regle à sa guise les code at leur circulation dans l'espace peut laisser reposer les veilleurs.

For Serres, everything exists in at least three distinct broad temporalities (At 126–7) which can be further subdivided and combined in different ways. The fi rst 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 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 (JVSH 36), and Darwin inscribes irreversible time at the heart of the natural sciences (JVSH 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’ (JVSH 36).133 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).134 The idea of negentropy was developed in the 1930s, describing a pocket of information preserved in a wider context of entropic decay (see JVSH 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) (Watkin 2020: 132)

People often speak of algorithms with reverence, with the respect appropriately owed to the sort of scientific or technical development that has changed lives. The reverence and the respect are well justified, but it is important to understand the nature of algorithms and be clear about their limits especially when we compare them to images. One should think of algorithms as recipes, as the way to prepare Wiener schnitzel or, as Michel Serres has suggested, tarte tatin.1 Recipes are helpful, of course, but they are not the thing that the recipes are meant to help you reach. You cannot taste a recipe of Wiener schnitzel or savor a recipe for tarte tatin. Thanks to your mind, you can anticipate the tastes and salivate accordingly, but given a recipe alone, you cannot really savor a nonexistent product. When people think of “uploading or downloading their minds” and becoming immortal, they should realize that their adventure—in the absence of live brains in live organisms—would consist in transferring recipes, and only recipes, to a computer device. Following the argument to its conclusion, they would not gain access to the actual tastes and smells of the real cooking and of the real food.

My body is an interchange of time. It is traversed with signals, noises, messages and parasites. It is not exceptional in this vast world. This remains true of animals and plants, of air and crystals, of cells and atoms, of groups and constructed objects. Transformation, deformation of information. I had thought that interchanges were intermediaries, that interference was on the fringe, that the translator was placed between instances43, that the bridge connected two riverbanks, that the path went from the origin to the goal. There are no instances. Or rather, instances, systems, riverbanks, etc. are analyzable in turn as interchanges, paths, translations and so on. There are no instances or systems except for black boxes. When we do not understand, when we defer our knowledge to a later date, when the thing is too complex for the means of the day, when we put everything in a temporary black box, we prejudge that it is a matter of a system. When we can finally open the box, we see that this box functions like a space of transformation. There are no systems, instances or substances except from our ignorance. A system is non-knowledge. The other side of non-knowledge. Non-knowledge has a chaos side and a system side. Knowledge bridges these two riverbanks. Knowledge as such is a space of transformation. This entire question is fractal.

The real passage occurs in the middle. Whatever direction determined by the swim, the ground lies dozens or hundreds of yards below the belly or miles behind and ahead. The voyager is alone. One must cross in order to know solitude, which is signaled by the disappearance of all reference points.