---------------------------------------------------------------- Serres Reads Pynchon © 2001 Hanjo Berressem. All rights reserved. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1. In his book Genesis, Michel Serres develops a philosophical geometrics in which straight lines are equated with the line of reason:ing that cuts through and thus wounds a more primary--both physical and psychic--multiplicity. As Serres states, linking this fundamental multiplicity to the concepts of chaos and noise: "The straight line of reason... must turn its back on... chaos.... What noise does the classical age repress, to what clamor does it close its ears, in order to invent our rationalism?" (20-1).¶ In the book's rhetorical matrix, the straight line is the figure of the age of reason and progress, and the work of rationalizing is quite literally understood as surveying and as road-work; the cutting of a concrete visto--an epistemological highway--through an inherently multiplex nature. As Serres notes, "we construct a real which is a rational one, we construct a real, among many possibilities, which is a rational one, among other possibilities, just as we pour concrete over the ground" (25). The ultimate aim of this rational project, a.k.a. the Enlightenment (at least in one of its many versions), is--as the Frankfurt school had already diagnosed, in particular in Adorno's and Horkheimer's The Dialectic of the Enlightenment--to gain dominion and control; to create, in the words of a neo-Adornian such as Jean Baudrillard, a state of overall operational simulation, in which the real has become--or is treated as--the rational.¶ One might well argue that this equation is what not only Genesis, but all of Serres's work most consistently argues against--especially in its link to political exploitation and to a state of deadly stasis--and it is this "disenchantment of the world" that Serres's most vitriolic rhetorics are directed against. As he argues in Hermes III, rationalism has become thanatocratic, a sentiment also echoed in Genesis: "the stable chain of the rationalists only expresses... their desire of domination. The empire is never more than some inflated local, a part that took the place of the whole.... There is reason there, there is violence there. There is order and growth there.... This chain is the chain of reason, this chain is the chain of death.... Rationalism is a vehicle of death" (72-3).¶ As the "other" to the rational line, Serres envisions a living chain that is defined not by necessity (Aristotle's ananké as the basis of rationalism), but by a more complex combination of chance and probability (what Aristotle called tyche and automaton respectively). This fragile, tangled up, twisted and knotted chain is related to unpaved paths--like those used by Native American people--rather than to concrete highways. Based as they are on maze-like meanderings and the politics of soft transfers, the geometrics of this chain evoke an eco:logical, "feng shui" science that honors rather than wounds the natural contours of the landscape.¶ Because such unpaved, winding paths are often temporary and thus fluid and dynamic, they de-linearize not only space but also time. They grow over and vanish, like the wake of a ship on the ocean, or like traces of footsteps on the smooth space of the prairie. As Serres states, "here then is the chain: white sea or white plain, background noise, surge, fluctuation of the surge, bifurcation, repetition, rhythm or cadence, vortex. The great turbulence is constituted, it fades away, it breaks. And disappears as it came.... This chain is not the chain of reasons.... Here we are in liquid history and the ages of waters. It is the chain of genesis. It is not solid. It is never a chain of necessity. Suddenly, it will bifurcate. It goes off on a tangent. It surrenders to... the fluctuations of the sea.... [It] is not a chain of chance either, it would remain meticulously broken. It is a chain of contingency [like a multiplex narrative].... A fragile and soft chain, easily cut, fragments easily replaced, a chain almost always broken.... It is the chain of life"(71-2).¶ Serres argues that since the Enlightenment, science has separated its agenda from this chain and has thrown in its lot with the straight line of rationalism, a move through which it has also aligned itself to (and thus subjected itself to) the latter's socio-political agenda. In that the sciences, like the rational control systems, favor dialectical, dualistic thought, they linearize and thus also martialize themselves. (In Serres's book La Naissance de la Physique: Dans le Texte de Lucrèce: Fleuves et Turbulences. [Paris: Minuit, 1977], this is negotiated as the quarrel between Mars and Venus.) They "easily line themselves up under the relentless tyranny of bureaucracy" (105, emphasis added). Because dialectics is logical and static "what is called dialectics is a rather crude trick of the straight line's, a logic of carefully placed invariants" (101). In opposition, "the work of transformation is that of the multiple" (101).¶ Serres's claim is that in order to become alive again, the various fields of science must once more open themselves up to the fragile chain of being (or rather: the "chain of becoming") and of genesis: "science must dissociate itself from it [the line of rationalism]. The soft quasi-chain... glimpsed, sketched, faintly, its local, tangential, contingent, aquatic drives and pulls, its open, free and unstable links, this badly woven fabric, or these proximities almost always abandoned as trials, attempts, essays, hold true... on occasion, for inert, more often for the living, little for the pathological and sometimes for the cultural, they hold true... for history" (73). [2] 2. A return from "linearization" to the chain of being:becoming and an opening up of spaces of possibility implies the break-up of the borders defined by the line of rationality. Only a chaotic, "attractive" writing--the development of a "third (writing) space"--can "make a ruckus... in the midst of... [the] dividing waters" (13) that make up a binary logic. In contrast to such a transgressive un-dividing, rationalization, in science as well as in social engineering, implies a mania for a sub-division that is always in complicity with power and control. [3] 3. As Serres notes, "Division into subsets minimizes fury. Division into subsets protects, preserves the unity of the body as a whole, because it tempers... free energy and channels it" (85). In this context, cutting a populace up into various groups, be it classes or castes, must be recognized as a violent act of exerting power and control: "Some put trust in the moving flux that does the coding and in its process, others put trust in the topography that loses it, in the classifying labyrinth that uses it up" (94). In these dynamics, "the more classification there is, the less evolution there is, the more classes there are, the less history there is, the more coded the sciences are, the more administrating there is, the less movement there is" (94). Once more, the ultimate aim and result of sub-division is the creation and maintenance of a state of stasis brought about by a process of purification, which is why "rationalists are priests, busily ruling out, cleaning up the filth, expelling people, purifying bodies or ideas" (99). In fact, "politics... have a function and a passion to reduce multiplicities, to reduce possibilities, to work at the confluences" (24). It is to such agendas of political order(ing)s that "alas! the multiple is always sacrificed" (31): [4] 4. Unlike order, with its project of demarcation and purification, the multiple is never (at) an end. Rather, it is a permanent beginning and always "before" order. It is the condition of existence in the sense of "presupposition": ("the surge is first--conditional" [97]) which, once it is ordered (when it "lies still and stands stagnant" [97]) becomes merely the "conditional"--now in the sense of a merely "hypothetical state" or also the "state of affairs." There are always forces operative within a stabilized and stabilizing system that contain the conditions of possibility and of keeping the system closed, [5] 5. although there are chances to re-create the truly conditional because "the conditions of possibility run, at times, through space... through society... through the body of silence... through beauty" (44). Not only here, Serres's discourse can be folded into the discourse of cultural studies, especially as it concerns subaltern and minority studies. In a historico-cultural context, for instance, settlers work against the subjunctive and the virtual:possible by thinking in a binary fashion that excludes inmixing, parasiting, hybridity, interfacing and cross-overs: "As soon as they find, discover, invent a blank place, the clamorous noisemakers who take the places race in, invade it, pin it down with noise, fury, hatred and illusion, they bury it beneath their tumult, and the original ones give up the place.... There are no conquerors, there are excluded ones, banished ones, in search of a place.... But this work of the negative drives out, banishes, excludes the middle, the third position" (77-78). Only a "third estate" or a "third space" which would include the complex space of the parasite--and in a literary frame, paraciting--could deconstruct the empire of duality and open up a once more multiplex field, [6] 6. a space once more populated by "crowds, packs, hordes" which are also Gilles Deleuze's counterterms to "the mass," which Serres, in a possible reference to Deleuze, relates to Leibniz, who "called them aggregates." Such an aggregate "is not a well-formed object" (2-3). It is always on such unstable, "far from equilibrium" machinic aggregates (Deleuze would call them "desiring-machines") that ordered systems are erected: [7] 7. History, then, is originally a virtual field of possibilities: a "plane of immanence" laced with chance tissue. This plane functions as an underlying historical matrix, because "the multiple... [is] the ordinary lot of situations" (5) and "history is... born... of circumstances" (100), as C.S. Peirce noted when he called for a historical tychism. On this multiple site, artificial orders--"planes of transcendence"--and divisions (of people, of classes, of territories, of eras in historiography) are stenciled. In order to deterritorialize these planes of transcendence again, one has to treat them, like every complex and chaotic aggregate, as "not a closed system" (98). [8] 8. The pure--either white or black--background noise on which each order rests is ultimately untamable, even by the "relentless" project of rationalism, which is why the state of historical multiplexity is so terrifying (i.e., the sites of Pynchon's "Zone(s)": Europe in Gravity's Rainbow, America in Mason & Dixon) and in some of its aspects is so downright inhuman: "Under the world of language, this wave, and beneath the wave, the black noise. The unknown, the infra-subject of hate and multiplicity" (139). [9] 9. The multiplex background noise of matter is a chromatic clamor, an acoustic "turbulence, it is order and disorder at the same time, order revolving on itself through repetition and redundancy, disorder through chance occurrences, through the drawing of lots at the crossroads, and through the global meandering, unpredictable and crazy. An arborescent and turbulent rumor" (59). Inherently random, it resists its ultimate integration into ordered linearity. In terms of chaos-theory or the theory of complexity, it is non-compressible, which means that it is un-categorizable and "incalculable... measureless. It always exceeds the machines' capacity for calculation" (127), as is the case with a series of numbers, which is defined as random if the smallest algorithm capable of specifying its recreation by a computer needs about the same number of bits of information as the original series consists of. This is why to compute a chaotic, complex, and multiplex system, one would need a computer "as big as the system itself." In a logic comparable to Borges's famous map, one would need a map as big as the territory. [10] 10. A narrative field that keeps a large number of stories going on at the same time, criss-crossing them, without a final resolution other than death, follows the same agenda as philosophy does in Serres's narrative. For both, the objective is to conditionalize, which means to open up possibilities rather than to work toward suturing confluences. The objective is to climb up the descending slope of growing order toward more multiplexity and toward more bifurcations. As Serres notes, "the philosopher keeps watch over unforeseeable and fragile conditions, his position is unstable, mobile, suspended, the philosopher seeks to leave ramifications and bifurcations open, in opposition to the confluences that connect them or close them. He goes back up the thalweg a bit, he climbs the chreod" (23). Multiplex storylining or philosophizing creates a space of a thousand plateaus, a "multiplicity of spaces" (60) that changes and oscillates according to each point-of-view, so that the narrative (as well as history and philosophy) becomes a picture-puzzle, like "paintings that, from one angle, show a nude woman, from another a scene from history, from elsewhere still a seascape. They are composed on purpose to say everything, under the assumption that from every site their scenography changes" (50). In such a multiplex topology, "all narratives have value, all theories as well. Every site delivers its coherence, invisible from any neighboring site" (51).¶ The utopia of such a narrative aggregate is Babel, as the figure of "an unintegrable multiplicity, a sort of intermittent aggregate, not closed upon its unity" (124). In an image reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari's diagram of the rhizome, in which order and disorder are forever intersecting, and in which every production of order and information is countered by dissemination and deconstruction, Serres "propose[s] the hypothesis, on which Kant must have paused awhile, that the universe vibrates between the one and the other, that it never stops pulsating... from a homothetic tower in which the apex... is a system, to a homothetic tower in which the apex... is a multiplicity" (130).¶ Like Derrida's, but even more like Deleuze and Guattari's, Serres's project is inherently literary. How to think the world without falling into the trap of stasis and linear, that is, ultimately, conceptual, thinking. As he states, evoking both the fluidity of chaotic systems and processes as well as the complexity of the weather system, "we despise contents, we administer flow charts" (3). The question is whether it is possible to "speak of multiplicity itself without ever availing myself of the concept?" (4); concepts being static and conceptual, because "coding is nothing more than showing unities in the stead of multiplicitous noise. Thus are concepts born" (86). The philosophical project would be "to think a new object, multiple in space and mobile in time, unstable and fluctuating like a flame, relational" (91). In this project, Serres draws on Nietzsche's "fluid dynamics of perception" as well as on Bergson, who is (with his theory of "becoming" and "processes" and his meditations on the "pornography of perception") also an important influence on Deleuze and Guattari. The question is whether the human mind can think without concepts; or, in Bergsonian terms, whether it is possible to think pure duration: "To think the surge, to think time, to think process, directly.... The pure processual is chaotic, or, as I put it, chreotic, as well" (97). [11] 11. The multiplex, then, is another word for the conditional. It designates the set of possibilities, the worlds that are "ifed" by choosing one rational "new world order" over all others. In a state in which everything is in a state of equal potentiality, there is no separation into reality (is) and imagination (if), because "before the point or the sense is decided, there is a space where all senses are in flux" (51). This state of un-differentiation is that of a pure multiplexity: "The raucous, anarchic, noisy, variegated... jumbled-up, mixed-up multiple, criss-crossed by myriad colors and myriad shades, is possibility itself. It is a set of possible things, it may be the set of possible things" (22). Serres uses once more natural images to describe the multiplex. Multiplex spaces are ecological biospheres, or what Deleuze and Guattari would call "smooth spaces": "The forest is multiplicity. The sea, again, is multiplicity" (56). Not surprisingly, the weather, as the muse of chaos theory, is the multiplex system par excellence. In a reference to La Naissance, Serres talks of "the background noise of the climate. We must praise any language that associates meteoric clusters, hail, hurricane, turbulence, squall, with the Greek word climate, which means: inclination" (102). As a chaotic system, the "climate is an aggregate concept" (102). It shares with the rhizome the characteristic of being "n-1" ("It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n-1)" (Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, et al. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. 21), because it is an incomputably complex aggregate; such as a true democracy is an incomputably complex aggregate (the fact that Whitman was so very aware of when he talked about America as an "aggregate" in the "Democratic Vistas" [in: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose. Ed. J. E. Miller. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959. 455-501]). A "true" democracy should be like such a natural aggregate, in the same way in which "a cloud is an aggregate, a nebulous set, a multiplicity whose exact definition escapes us, and whose local movements are beyond observation. A flame is an aggregate.... Heat and flame, cloud and wind, climate and turbulence, we could refer to them as concepts for multiplicities. We are, now, well enough prepared by our sciences to be able to conceive them in their unanalyzable complexity" (103).¶ While social aggregates tend toward unity, stability, and toward closure ("n+1") (Deleuze and Guattari call this process "molarization"), a true aggregate should be an open system, which is why one has to stress dissention (one might think here of Lyotard) and diversity. As Paul Cilliers states in Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems (New York: Routledge, 1998), "just as the flow of energy is necessary to fight entropy and maintain the complex structure of the system, society can only survive as process" (122). [12] 12. Serres takes up the basic tenet of chaos theory, namely that every order is only a spatial and temporal island in a turbulent sea of disorder and multiplicity, when he states that the universe itself is "an immense fractal turbulence, a global turbulence of large, medium, small... microscopic turbulences" (106-7) and thus "a mix of order and disorder" (107). As David Ruelle and others have shown, turbulence is "an intermediary state, and also an aggregate mix.... Chaos appears there, spontaneously, in the order, order appears there in the midst of disorder.... The turbulent state mixes or associates the one and the multiple, systematic gathering together and distribution" (109). Oscillating between "lawful determinism and undeterminism" (109), it is a field that cannot be thought by classical science ("Here, classical science reigns, there, the new tree of multiplicities fluctuates" [109]), and that cannot be described in reference to linear, reversible time ("Here, time is in legal expectation, there, our uncertainties waft along on forecasts, in the meteorological sense" [109]).¶ As "turbulence is a median state between a slightly redundant order and pure chaos" (121), it can be described as "a chaotic multiplicity of orderly or unitary multiplicities and chaotic multiplicities" (110). Ultimately, therefore, "the cosmos is not a structure, it is a pure multiplicity of ordered multiplicities and pure multiplicities" (111). In the science wars, then, the voice of order might not have the final word: "It is always assumed that multiplicities can, through various procedures, be eliminated. I assume that they cannot be, I find that they cannot be and I hope that they are not" (128). [13] 13. One of Serres's examples to describe the process of rational conceptualization involves the mathematical differentiation between flux and fluxion (the one processual and analog, the other static and digital). In this, he draws on Leibniz's introduction of differential calculus into science, an introduction that has caused science to describe "pornographies of flight."¶ "Fluent" is Newton's term for variable. The aim is to find the rate of change of a variable, or in Newton's wording "the fluxion of a given fluent." Fluxions are plotted on graphs, such as the function y = x². Newton thought of the graph of a function as a curve generated by a moving point P (x, y). As P traces the curve both the x and the y coordinates continuously vary with time: time itself was thought to "flow" at a uniform rate--hence the word fluent. Newton now set out to find the rates of change of x and y with respect to time--that is, their fluxions. This he did, as Dedekind did with his famous "cut," by (1) considering the difference, or change, in the values of x and y between two "adjacent" instances and then (2) dividing this difference by the elapsed time interval. The final, crucial step was to set the elapsed time interval equal to zero--or, more precisely, to think of it as so small as to be negligible. In Serres's words: "The differential of the flux is the fluxion. So the flux is a sum, and classical rationality is safe, I am going from the local, fluxion, to the global, flux, and conversely. Be advised: flux is a multiplicity of fluctuations. So flux is unintegrable, it is not a sum, the path from the global to the local and back can be cut. I am praying for a completely new calculus for fluctuations, a different rationality remains to be conceived" (65).¶ Via the logic of infinitesimal calculus, rational thought claims to provide a smooth passage from the local (particular) to the global (universal). Through breaking up the global flux into particular fluxions, it claims that it can penetrate all matter "through what is undoubtedly the most brilliant operation of all time, the differentiation: we get fluxion, or a differential of flux. A fluxion is a fraction of a flux as minimally different from the flux as much as possible [sic], apart from size and order. The fluxion vanishes as the flux flows along, fluxion drifts off as flux goes by. The flux is at all points self-coded. Hence the open path from the local to the global. Hence the simplest of methods, open through automorphism" (99). As opposed to this cutting up and confluencing, Serres advocates a thought that surfs on the pure processual and the fluxional: "the tip of the crest of the swell, now that is what a fluctuation is.... The noise,... the surge, is a multiplicity of which we do not know the sum [again, the rhizomatic state that Deleuze & Guattari denote as n-1]" (67). [14] 14. Serres stays within the fluid-dynamical reference when he uses the image of the thalweg, which denotes the Lucretian inclination, to describe the trajectory of growing order and confluence: "The downstream course, the worn-out path, the slope, the chreod, run, from upstream confluences to downstream confluences, toward synthesis and the unitary" (17). Given such an ordering confluence, it is only by either going uphill, and thus negentropically, or by tilting the complete plane that multiplexity can once more come into being, because "the upstream course... multiplies its bifurcations" (17). Given the "historical" implication of the thalweg, Serres defines the passage from openness to closure as a fight of the old vs. the young; a designation that can be applied to a young republic as well: "The more the human body is young and the more it is possible, the more it is capable of multiplicity, and the more time it has... the more variety of river beds it has to flow down.... The entire volume of the old body is occupied by archives, museums, traces, narratives" (32-3). Becoming more and more inflexible, static and bound by the exoskeleton of language, "our body comes down time.... It runs fatally along determination" (35).¶ In this context, Serres once more differentiates between rational, linear time and a multiplex time, which consists of multiple temporal fluctuations: "Time is the positive infinitude of possible determinations. It is the omnitude of novelties. Time is not, as a rule, a line, although it may become one, and then start selecting, sorting, eliminating, getting all at once bushier and bushier with bifurcations: another time on top of time, appears; time, nonlinear, is, most often, a sheet [narrative plane, page] or field" (115). Ultimately, time--every moment:event--is an aggregate n-1 because "time... is not a flux that can be differentiated into tiny little fluxions... it is, for the most part, a sumless aggregate, a bundle of dispersed fluctuations" (116). As so often in contemporary thought, the parts are more than their sum. [15] 15. What underlies meaning is the pure noise of the moment, the sheer complexity and potentiality of the undifferentiated and undifferentiable "now." This is a time without binarisms, because "the noise has no contrary. The space of the noise has no complementary, no outside" (62). This noise can be reached only when the subject stops being a sorting and coding Maxwell's Demon. Serres evokes this regression through an image easily transferable to a scene on the American prairies: "On the plain a noise arises. A door and a direction, a semiconduction ["I am a semiconductor, I admit it, I am the demon" (66)] and a way, a receiver, a Maxwell's demon. The wind does not perhaps quite come whencesoever it will. In the beginning, then, is the bifurcation" (63). Of course this question is also eminently literary ("Can we imagine a chaotic and primal multiple with respect to knowledge, a confused murmur, a noise that precedes and underlies the classified encyclopedia?" [100]) and eminently political ("How much disorder is necessary for living beings [and] for history?" [132]). In terms of language, this regression implies a return, through language's function of naming, to once more unnamed words: "In the beginning are nameless words, verbs without nouns... this fractal complexity is a trace of the multiple, the real multiple, different in every aspect.... The multiple moves, that is all. In the beginning is the multiple: it rushes around" (101). Such words move around freely, playing "mindless games" (outside of the agenda of production and of meaning, and, of course, outside of agenda of the production of meaning), like children do when they become sheer movement. It is through these incomputable, improbable moments that "newness enters the world," because they are moments of possibility and of surprise. As Serres notes, "if we are alive, it is because we know, because we hope that the unforeseeable will happen, that it will be unconnected to what is already there" (134). [16] 16. Ultimately, the Serrian project calls for the attempt chiastically to cross order and disorder rather than to think in binarisms; to "extricate... [oneself] from the hell of dualism.... The one is in the multiple and chaos is in order" (131-2). It is in this concern that his poetics are at the most acute. Rather than opting for simplifications and separations, he evokes a field of thought defined by complexity. Similar to the "ecosophy" that Félix Guattari advocates in Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), Serres's philosophy is an intricate machine that maps chaos theory (the theory of complexity), the history of science, philosophy, and art. The "space of thought" created by this machine is a philosophical mobile in which, as in Marcel Duchamp's Unhappy Ready-Made, static geometrics (as a figure of the static, fully rational sciences that Serres is so often writing about and criticizing in the name of complexity) are suspended into the weather of life. The latter consists of an edition of Euclid's Elements, which Duchamp gave to his sister as a wedding gift with the instruction to suspend it from her balcony by a thread. Through this suspension of the very emblem of Euclidean geometry into the turbulent space of the climate--the suspension of "the elements" into "the elements"--the book, and with it science, becomes a true mobile. In this context, Serres's books are not asking for a return to a state of irrationality, but for a new rationality that shows respect to and that incorporates into its project the unpredictabilities, the probabilities (symptomatically, in the newspapers around the turn of the century, the weather forecast used to be called "the probabilities"), and the complexities and the "emergent" character of the world. They ultimately ask for an in-itself turbulent and complex rationality, and thus for a new contract with nature. [start] Dept. of American Literature and Culture University of Cologne hanjo.berressem@uni-koeln.de ---------------------------------------------------------------- COPYRIGHT (c) 2001 HANJO BERRESSEM. 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