Inventing the natural contract

ABSTRACT

The aim of this essay is to discuss one particular aspect concerning the methodological and linguistic dimensions of Michel Serres’ notion of the ‘natural contract’. The essay focuses on the way in which his call for a radical shift in the relation of nature and the human leads him to reject the critical tradition in philosophy most often identified with Kant and to turn instead to invention as a form of philosophical language that is both legitimate and necessary. By examining the reasons and implications for this shift towards the synthetic, non-chronological and polyvocal, I argue that Serres’s use of invention raises questions of how the language of the natural contract must incorporate a ‘natural’ or nonhuman element into a contractual relation. My essay seeks to shed further light on this, the very possibility of communication. The essay concludes with a discussion of the question as to whether Serres’s notion marks a new and problematic version of a grand narrative that is susceptible to the diagnosis of the postmodern condition made by Lyotard as an incredulity towards metanarratives.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article a pour objectif de discuter un aspect méthodologique et linguistique de la notion de « contrat naturel » telle qu’elle est utilisée par Michel Serres. L’article explore la manière dont son appel à un changement radical concernant la relation de l’homme à la nature le conduit à rejeter la tradition critique en philosophie souvent associée à Kant et à se tourner vers l’invention en tant que forme de langage philosophique qui est à la fois légitime et nécessaire. En examinant les raisons et les implications de ce changement en direction du synthétique, du non-chronologique et du polyvocal, je soutiens que l’utilisation que fait Serres de l’invention pose la question de la manière dont le langage et le contrat naturel doivent incorporer un élément « naturel » ou non-humain à une relation contractuelle. Mon article cherche à éclairer ce propos : la possibilité même de communication. L’article se clôture sur la question suivante : la notion de Serres marque-t-elle une version nouvelle et problématique d’un grand récit selon le diagnostique de Lyotard.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I am taking this phrase from the conclusion to Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life, but any number of works, lectures, or common declarations written or made over the last two decades say in effect the same thing. Particularly relevant in this context is Bruno Latour, whose work intersects with that of Serres in many ways and who together conducted a series of conversations published as Serres/Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture and Time. See also Latour’s Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Trans. Catherine Porter. Polity, 2017, and Down To Earth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Trans. Catherine Porter. Polity, 2018.

2. Cf. ‘Lucretius: Science and Religion’, pp. 113–14. The importance of Lucretius’s physics for Serres deserves an extensive discussion, particularly the former’s notion of the clinamen, the ‘swerve’, which unfortunately I cannot do here other than mention a few especially relevant points.

3. Mythical though it may be, Serres insists that the social contract is ‘fundamental and indispensable to understanding how the obligations that bind us to one another were born’ (NC, 53). What is noteworthy in these passages is the emphasis on contractual language; however, it is not so much language as a signifying practice as language as a form of communication that is meant here. And communication in turn is understood as the exchange of information and the accompanying role of noise as obstacle or interference. The priority that Serres gives to the language of contract, which in the natural contract takes the form of both ‘reciprocity’ and ‘symbiosis’, will be central to the discussion of the question that most concerns me in this essay: what is this ‘nonhuman’ or indeed, inhuman language of nature? See Maria Assad’s Reading with Michel Serres on the complex role of noise [bruit] as both excluded middle and as ‘Ur-Noise’ in Serres.

4. And again, ‘The terms contract, obligation, and alliance, for example, speak to us etymologically of ligatures, ties, bonds’ (NC, 106). The materialist aspect of Serres’s conception is emphasised repeatedly.

5. Serres does not hesitate to use the term grand récit even and despite Lyotard’s diagnosis of our postmodern condition as an incredulity towards the grands récits of the European Enlightenment.

6. On a side note, what is so often provocative about Kant’s philosophy is not only what is accomplished but what isn’t. In his endeavour to find in aesthetic judgement a possibility for unifying the divided worlds of cognition and freedom which would in turn yield a unified subjectivity, Kant hesitates and ultimately sets limits to the unity and self-mastery of the modern subject.

7. See especially p. 11ff. of The Natural Contract.

8. On this issue Christopher Watkin’s ‘Michel Serres’ Great Story: From Biosemantics to Econarratology’ is particularly relevant (Watkin 2015).

9. Style, as he insists, is no mere ornament. They are in fact the same. ‘Style reveals methodology’ (Latour and Serres 1995, 125).

10. A more in-depth discussion of the relation between chaos theory and invention as a style of temporal mixing cannot be undertaken here, unfortunately. My sole emphasis is on the way that invention embodies the movement between things, places and times whose synthesis can create or re-establish new relations and, indeed, new forms of order.

11. Cf. p. 38 of The Natural Contract.

12. The term is taken from Luciano Floridi’s work, which is discussed at some length by Ashley Woodward in his book, which I am relying on here, Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition (to which I would refer the reader since I am not able to go into the matter extensively). See especially Chapter 2, ‘Information and Event: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Information’.

13. Cf. Woodward 2016, p. 52, for a more detailed discussion.

14. ‘The only value an initial disorder has from an information-theoretic perspective is to establish an order—that is, to constitute a message when decoded’ (Woodward 2016, 65).

15. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements.

16. See Lyotard, The Inhuman, pp. 2–7.

17. Serres employs the term ‘incandescence’ to express the condition of the human as a ‘white page’, a tabula rasa that is capable of perpetually being born and of infinite differentiations in so far as it is originally de-differentiated (see Serres 2018, 208–11).