L’Incandescent
Aphorisms on the thought of Michel Serres
In the last few years, I’ve found myself fascinated by how Michel Serres thought. I’ve said it before and I’ll make it clear here: while the great thinkers of time (like Nietzsche, James, Bergson, Heidegger) use time to tell us about the expandability of experience, the late Michel Serres showed us in his writing how this can happen. Most of his books revolve around a particular topic (e.g., Rome, geometry, the five senses, education, physics, communication), but each topic expands and contracts in Keplerian elliptical orbits. While pulling in much more than each topic traditionally allows, each book de-centers the main object of knowledge beyond its home. As a reader, my attention broadens as I follow his connections — which requires me to take them seriously. I even begin to see and feel how my body and its five senses become part of attention and can no longer be relegated to the supporting cast (at best) for the pas da deux between sight and thought. The whole body becomes included in the process of an expanding capacity for experience.
The following aphorisms are an appreciation of this quality of Serres’ thought. I return to his books again and again to find a vast and deep well from which to draw new insights and expand my own capacity to experience the whole of Eternal Recurrence and the multiplicity of durées. He called this total accumulation of durations le Grand Récit, which was of course poking more than a bit of fun at Lyotard’s famous dictum about the postmodern condition.1
More than poking fun, however, Serres’ use of this term is an excellent demonstration of how his thought and writing works. He took a maligned concept — Lyotard’s grand récits — and breathed new life into it by making it into the Eternal Recurrence of everything that has ever been. But he did so while draining it of the regressive claims that Lyotard was seeking to negate. It was a marvelous achievement — to embrace the deconstructive desires of his poststructuralist peers without the starting point of, and entrapment in, negation. In doing so, it seems to me that he channeled the spirit of Nietzsche’s amor fati far better than those who explicitly aligned with Nietzsche at the time.
Eternal Recurrence of le Grand Récit
The opening pages of L’Incandescent recount a scene of an ancestral farm. Clearly channeling Bergson, the first section is called “Descente dans la durée” (Decent into duration). Here Serres weaves together multiple durées — geological, biological, human, cosmic. The narrative effect is to demonstrate how attention can stretch to become aware of the eternal presence of the past — all of the past that makes up le Grand Récit. This is not an eighteenth-century novel where time is composed as progress toward a neat and tidy moral ending. We are not Fielding’s Tom Jones heading, however circuitously, toward the final revelation of his true identity; nor is this Richardson’s Pamela, whose virtue converts Mr. B in the end. Serres compresses and thus makes contemporary multiple durées all present at one and the same moment of attention. Each element of the narrative — the cliffs, the waterfall, the home, the paint, the girl, her doll, et cetera — has its own durée and thus its own potential narrative. Serres, however, chooses a narrative style that forgoes the individual narratives to weave together a synthesis of durées without allowing any one of them to be the final answer.
Nor do we find ultimate coherence within each duration. Serresian durée is not the purity of flow that makes becoming into just another mode of stable being. We might be able step twice into the same Seine flowing under the Mirabeau Bridge, but we do not step into a unidirectional and unified flow: “countercurrents impelled part of the flow to head back upstream; eddies and turbulences seized another part under the bridge pier, randomly and in a circle; evaporation transformed yet another part into vapor.”2 Simply substituting the unity of flow for the unity of being is merely to flip the binary and remain trapped in “two-valued logic,” which Serres always sought to expand, undo, and escape.
Serres’ interweaving of durées does what Nietzsche had hoped ER would do, even more so. For ER to work as a transformative thought, we have to see the past as accumulating into the present. When we see ourselves as participants in that accumulation, we experience that we are part of making that which will eternally recur. Nietzsche says it, but Serres shows how to experience it through the extrapolation of le Grand Récit in the ancestral farm.
Incandescence at the Edge of Time
L’incandescent descends into ER’s edge of accumulating durations. For ER to work the way Nietzsche envisioned it, it has to be incandescent as Serres envisioned it: the present is filled with all of the past, and that fullness becomes the condition of possibility of experience born of our efforts. Let’s take an everyday example: when we speak or write, wheredoes the language we use exist? From the perspective of a spatially biased thinker, it exists either nowhere or in activated regions of the brain. From the perspective of a time-based thinker, it exists only in durée. Because I am fluent in English, I do not need to consult the spatialized object of a dictionary whenever I want to compose a sentence. I simply start the effort of speaking or writing.3
Durée is not necessarily smooth; it is incandescent. We struggle with turning thoughts into clear sentences. We grope for words. We mark this groping with “um” as a way of indicating that we are finding our way through the marriage of thoughts and words. Sometimes we reverse course and revise. We “walk back” words that we wish were never said. We are interrupted by other durées that throw us off track. This is speaking as the experience of incandescence. As such, the present must be the accumulation of all that has been said in the past for a language to remain alive. But it also has to be much, much more than this. The act of speaking must include the accumulation in the here and now of evolutionary and atmospheric history for our vocal cords to emit vibrations transmitted through the air that can be received and synchronized by the interwoven temporalities of the human auditory system.
Staring into Geometry
Serres attended to the complexity of how time and space, durée and topology, are not reducible to inherent logics that we discover by staring deeply into things. The closer Serres stares into le Grand Récit and “descends into durée,” the more he finds time in and out of joint.
In La Naissance de la physique, Serres takes us deeply into a common geometrical figure — the tangent and its curve. The more we stare into this figure looking for the spatial “where” of the departure’s origin, the more we realize that we need to put everything in motion to understand anything of what it happening.
Where exactly does the declination start? Let’s say that we actually find that moment — the place where the angle of the line and the angle of the curve are the same. We will discover that we can understand nothing without putting the declination in motion. Serres captures this in the figure of Lucretius’ clinamen, which he defines as “the minimum angle for a curve to depart from a tangent.” We can measure its trajectory through differential equations as the curve unfolds in time, but even if we found the origin, we would not find an angle or even be able to see that an angle was about to begin in that place.4
Here is the upshot: Serres shows us that the harder we stare into the moment of separation looking for answers, the more we train our attention to put things in motion to understand what is going on. “The proto-dynamics of Lucretius consists in asking ‘what really happens when this angle appears or subsists over a length of time’ And the answer is ‘everything’.” The answers we seek must be found in the differential movement of curves and the interacting motions they bring about. Unless origins are understood as motion, we will understand very little if anything at all. This unfolding is everything5
Emptiness, Entanglement, Memory
Using the figure of the clinamen to understand le Grand Récit prevents the latter from being reduced to the expression of Nature’s Laws. It is not even the smooth flow of time. It is an act of deciphering any chosen starting point as interwoven into the whole, but without the desire for the interweaving to be necessarily uniform, stable, and the expression of something immobile holding it together:
The jigsaw puzzle spurts out like a jet. Like a good theatre play or a successful novel, the Grand Narrative begins just anywhere, just anytime, strictly contingently, although it carries the succession of events in its sides, albeit chaotically. Each of its bifurcations arises like a dramatic turn of events, possible certainly, but in the very vicinity of the impossible, like a kind of miracle, like a very low probability event. The Narrative doesn’t unfold but rather jumps from the unforeseeable or the impossible-to-predict to the necessary when it moves from the perspective of the future towards the completed past while traversing the possibilities of the present. It thus carries the contingents on its shoulders. (The Incandescent, 22)
We are woven within le Grand Récit. We do not sit on the sidelines looking at time pass from the vantage point of our subjectivity. We are in it, and insofar as we are in le Grand Récit, we are shot through with myriad “conservatories” of the past in the present: “our organism includes, as we now know, dozens of clocks — cardiac ones, digestive ones, neural or molecular ones — all of them disrupted by the jetlag at the end of a long flight across longitudes … clocks unknown to Bergson, Husserl, or Heidegger…” (The Incandescent, 11). These durations are memory and forgetfulness; these durations are the conservatories of Eternal Recurrence.
DNA is one of those clocks. We can have no more complete expression of le Grand Récit as ER than the phrase, “Like a paramecium, a bellflower, an octopus, we bear inside ourselves, in the form of DNA, this passive accumulation of life and of our species … we live as memories” (The Incandescent, 27). Or again, the capturing of time in the glaciers of Greenland: “But once again, who has memory? The tradition answers: humans, their cognition, their mnemonic function, their written, engraved or drawn traces, the ones they decipher. No, for the things themselves memorize all by themselves and directly. The past is inscribed in them; it is deciphered there” (35). The past is always present as the vast memory of le Grand Récit in which we live, as myriad durations that are the conservatories and accumulation of the past in the present.
Global Intuition
With Christopher Watkins’ Michel Serres: Figures of Thought, the English-speaking world finally has an excellent source for understanding Serres’ body of work. Early on, Watkins points out that Serres’ global intuition is central to how he thinks. In the course of Watkins’ elaboration, he made the connection to Eternal Recurrence that we’ve been tracing: “Like Nietzsche’s eternal return, an intuition is not something that can exhaustively be explained, because it explains everything else.” He continues a few pages later:
An intuition requires cultivation, reflection, meditation. It may come in a flash but it takes work to inhabit it. For instance, Serres urges that, in order to intuit the vast time that has elapsed since the Big Bang and its implications for our understanding of ourselves and the world, ‘we have to carry out a theoretical effort as well as an existential one: trying to live and understand the content and stakes of this new ancientness’6
We should begin to sense the connection between Bergsonian and Serresian intuition. Both seek to tap into experience as it is becoming rationalized in concepts and other mental fixities of thought that provide systematic structure and organization.7 As such, global intuitions such as le Grand Récit and l’incandescent seek to open a “pre-theoretical sensitivity” to our thinking just as Nietzsche sought with ER — a thought that would transform or perhaps crush you — and Bergson sought with durée.
But what does it mean for Serresian intuition to be global? Like ER and durée, a global intuition absorbs everything into it including ourselves, our intuition, and the words we use to try to access it. This has always been the hard part for philosophy (and religion for that matter). It’s one thing to build systems that seek to capture reality in a neat and tidy box of tightly fitting concepts. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is such an object. Reading that work is like inspecting the interior mechanisms of one of John Harrison’s longitude clocks, which were contemporaries of Kant. Perfectly assembled and precisely arranged, these clocks are self-contained objects meant to keep perfect chronological time. 8
John Harrison's H-2 at the Royal Observatory
It is quite another effort to use philosophical thought to access global intuition. If I find any limits on the thought of Nietzsche and Bergson as thinkers of time, it could be that the intuition they seek to access remains my intuition. Serres wants to globalize this intuition, which does not mean to objectify it. It means that the act of tracing intuition has its only possible end by reaching all the way back to the beginnings of time. My intuition is revealed as part of the onward march of accumulating durations made possible by all that has happened in le Grand Récit.
To put a point on this, let’s pick up where Watkins left off in his quotation of The Incandescent. Serres writes:
Let’s first look at our hands, our skin and those of our neighbours, whose texture dates back to incredible epochs; we have murmured music, no doubt, for hundreds of thousands of years; let’s next contemplate hens, sparrows, oaks and reeds, companions that are sometimes even older than us by millions of years; let’s lastly consider the mountains, wind, sea and stars, by means of new clocks, to be a billion-year-old environment. Undergoing those sudden agings being-in-the-world changes both being and worlds.9
This exercise of looking at something closely only to find the ER of le Grand Récit is a common trope of Serres. This is but one example. The intent is not to understand a final answer, but to use language to descend into the infinitely large Grand Récit and its innumerable durées.
Further Reading and Listening
If this post has inspired you to read Michel Serres, this post from Professor Watkins is an excellent source for how to begin.
Robert Harrison’s interview of Christopher Watkins on Serres can be found on the Entitled Options podcast.
The Hermitix Podcast has conducted a series of interviews on the work of Serres. A good place to start is the interview with David Webb.
Footnotes
I loved The Postmodern Condition when I first read it in one of Clifford Siskin’s seminars at SUNY Stony Brook in the early 1990’s, and I still do love it. Attending Lyotard’s seminars at Stony Brook around the same time is one of the great experiences of my intellectual life. You can read my appreciation of PMC here. We shouldn’t reduce Lyotard’s dictum to the end of grand narratives, but the end of our ability and willingness to believe in them. The latter is very different than simply declaring them to have come to an end, and we are living with these consequences today.
Geometry, xxxv. I’m using Randolf Burks’ translation of Les Origins de la géometrie, published originally in 1995.
I may be activating language in certain regions of my brain, but that is merely part of the temporal process. We should never mistake where something is instantiated for what it is and how it works. For those regions to work, language must be a shared resource between me and my audience, and this shared resource can only exist in duration. No matter how hard we stare at an image of the brain during speech, we will never understand what is being said, how it is being interpreted, or anything else that would convey meaning.
We are swimming in Jamesian waters. One can find this image of the clinamen (though not the term) throughout “A World of Pure Experience.” One example will suffice: “We live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest, and our sense of determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path. It is as if a differential quotient should be conscious and treat itself as an adequate substitute for a traced-out curve. Our experience, inter alia, is of variations of rate and of direction, and lives in these transitions more than in the journey’s end.” (The Writings of William James, John J. McDermott, ed., 206.)
Birth of Physics, 42. I’m using the translation by William Ross and David Webb. You can read my summary of it here.
Figures of Thought, 29. The Serres quotation is from The Incandescent, page 105, with the translation modified from Burks’ translation.
These fixities of thought are not problems for Serres (or for Bergson). They are part of experience. The problems occur when we think that this capacity for certain fixities is the reality of experience and the rest is illusion. In this way, Serres and Bergson are both aligned with the thought of William James’ radical empiricism.
The video is from my September 2023 visit to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, where the Harrison clocks (H1-H4) are all on display. H1, 2, and 3 are all running.
The Incandescent, 105.