Thinking in the World

A Reader

Jill Bennett, Mary Zournazi, Jill Bennett, Mary Zournazi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350069244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Engaging with contemporary issues responsibly and creatively can become a very abstract activity. We can sometimes find ourselves talking in terms of theories and philosophies which bear very little resemblance to how life is actually lived and experienced. In Thinking in the World, Jill Bennett and Mary Zournazi curate writings and conversations with some of the most influential thinkers in the world and ask them not just why we should engage with the world, but also how we might do this. Rather than simply thinking about the world, the authors examine the ways in which we think in and with the world. Whether it's how to be environmentally responsible, how to think in film, or how to dance with a non-human, the need to engage meaningfully in a lived way is at the forefront of this collection. Thinking in the World showcases some of the most compelling arguments for a philosophy in action. Including wholly original, never-before-released material from Michel Serres, Alphonso Lingis, and Mieke Bal, the different chapters in this book constitute dialogues and approachable essays, as well as impassioned arguments for a particular way of approaching thinking in the world.

PART ONE

Thinking worlds

1

Revolutions in thinking

Michel Serres (MS) and Mary Zournazi (MZ)

Introductory remarks

How does the world think? This is a question that invites us to consider the nature of perception and the materiality of the world. If the world thinks – if mountains, rivers, trees and rocks perceive the world – how does this reorient philosophies of perception? It is these questions that invite us to reconsider the relations between art, philosophy and science to pose new directions in thinking. In this chapter, Michel Serres and Mary Zournazi explore the fundamental questions of what thinking in the world might mean, and how the world itself thinks. For Serres, all animate and inanimate objects in this world share a form of information exchange; it is this ‘communication’ that we share in common, and it is this commonality that calls for a radical philosophy of perception – a philosophy that ask us to move beyond a human-centred vision to multi-vocal perceptions of the world.

To rethink perception, then, is central to all of knowledge practices and relationships: economic, social and environmental. With our human-centred vision, there have been fundamental misadventures in our thinking, and because of this, Serres suggests two parallel gaps that have emerged in the world. First, there is the belief that humans have control over nature, and second, that the objects of human production such as money, economics and power relations are not seen as products of human invention.¹ The world has become the ‘silent’ partner in histories of human ignorance and waste.

In The Natural Contract, Serres give us a very precise image of this type of violence using Goya’s painting, ‘Men Fight with Sticks’: two duellists striking blows at each other, and with each blow they sink further and further into a muddied quicksand. Serres notes that the earth will swallow up the fighters before they, and the gamblers, have had a chance to settle accounts’.² As a result of this battle among ourselves, we are at the borderline: we are now faced with a world that may no longer be able to support our ongoing violence and destruction to life and habitat.

Over many decades, Michel Serres’s illustrious writings and philosophical inventions show the deep concern for the ecology of the world, because as he reminds us there are ‘thoughtful subjects everywhere’. Together Serres and Zournazi discuss some of these subjects, and the elements for thinking with the world, not about the world.

Things of the world

MZ: I want to start by asking you about how the world thinks? In your books Biogea and the Natural Contract, ³ you talk about aspects of the world’s thinking that can take place without humans … We spoke about this previously together, and the role of ‘information’ but let’s start with thinking.

MS: Our Western way of thinking makes a clear distinction between us humans as active subjects, and the objects of the world, which are passive. There are three ways of understanding this. Firstly, we think the world, and the world is thought by us. Secondly, we act on the world, and the world is the object of our actions. And thirdly, we have rights over the world, whereas the world has none over us. That is how we think, and this way of thinking has been very fertile, very fecund, very useful, and has led us to an unparalleled exploitation of the world – as a result of which we have made the most of the world, become rich, knowledgeable and comfortable. All well and good. However the inevitable conclusion of these three actions is that we find ourselves today facing a serious problem, namely, that we are destroying the world. And we are doing so because we consider ourselves the only active subjects, and think that we can exploit our passive world intellectually, actively and legally.

So we might say that these three ways of thinking – intellectual, practical and legal – have enabled us to make considerable progress, but we have reached an impasse. And these three points are the focus of my thinking: the intellectual, the practical and the judicial. I began with the third point, namely, that we have all possible rights over the world, whereas things in the world have none over us. Do you see? You who come from Australia, you know that there are cultures other than ours for which things in the world are not mere passive objects, are not to be exploited, are not objects, bereft of rights. You see that there are other cultures that teach us a wisdom we have forgotten. For instance, I exposed that wisdom in The Natural Contract, where I propose that the things of the world should become legal subjects.⁴ This is unthinkable under Western law, precisely because we alone can be legal subjects.

Indeed, since I wrote The Natural Contract, many countries – Brazil, the US, occasionally even France – have begun to evolve, judicially speaking, and to consider that it might be possible, for example, for a state forest to defend itself against its users: the forest would, in these circumstances, be considered a legal subject and would have the right to sue its users. This was unthinkable before The Natural Contract, because there was no such definition of objects as legal subjects, that is having the right to take human beings to court.

That is the legal side. Naturally the practical side is even more difficult. In other words, can we consider that objects might not be merely passive? This is where the notion of information, about which we spoke last time, comes to bear on the problem. Here is more or less what I said: When we take a living being, we can define it as receiving information, emitting information, storing information and processing information. Such is the life of a living being. Once you understand these four rules concerning living beings and information, you long to use them to define life itself. You say, ‘Hang on, life is precisely these four operations’. Well, not quite, because I do not know a single inert object about which one cannot also say that it receives, emit s, stores and processes information. This is true of a crystal, of a gem stone, of a metallic object and so on. And it’s equally true of a continent, a star, a planet or of any other object in the world. This is an odd thing to say, because we wonder: what is a human being? A human being is someone who emits, receives, stores and processes information. You realize that these four rules are shared by human beings, alone or in groups, living beings and objects – and that is a significant modern discovery.

Once we have defined these four rules of information, namely, emitting, receiving, storing and processing, we notice something surprising, which is that these four rules are true for life, for the inert and for human activity, whether individual or otherwise. At the moment, I am emitting information, receiving information from you, storing it inside myself and processing it, obviously. Any group of humans, whether a family, a village, a nation and so on, is also a cluster of beings emitting, receiving, storing and processing information. As a result, these four rules are universally true, and bring together living beings, inert objects and humans in new and intimate ways, and that is indeed a new discovery.

MZ: If we consider that this process of information is universal, how does it redefine what it means to be human? How do we understand our sense of ‘collective’, whether it is a family, village or nation? And how does this provide another sense of intimate relations and connexions with the world?

MS: In the past, when we thought about family relationships, we thought about how the family related to the city. And when we thought about a city in terms of its relationships, we wondered how the city might relate to the nation. However, what I am proposing shows that whether we’re talking about a family, a city or a nation’s relationships, they are all situated in the world. And this allows us to understand our new relationships with the world. Here is an example. For the ancient Romans, the word familia designated father, mother, children, ancestors, but also cattle, sheep, wheat, life and their farming tools. So family meant human relationships, relationships with living beings, and at the same time their relationship to the land they cultivated. I would like to restore this ancient sense of relationships. Today, we need to broaden our relationships so that they resemble something a bit like the Roman familia.

MZ: Returning to the four functions – emitting, receiving, storing and processing information – that exist in objects that we would not have thought had this capacity, what does this mean for how we understand the thought processes of objects? How do we come to understand this ‘difference’, and appreciate it without oppressing or pushing our own thinking onto objects? What does this revolution in thought mean?

MS: Well this is an old question, that science has been asking since the beginning. We don’t impose our way of thinking on the world. Simply observing objects, or understanding what law governs them, is already a way in which human beings can listen to objects. In other words, we receive information from these objects. Do you see what I mean? Consequently we cannot say that they think, obviously, but the mere fact of observing them is a kind of respect that we can show towards objects. We do not impose our way of thinking on them – quite the contrary. We are, so to speak, passive recipients of the information they broadcast to us.

I think what I’m proposing is a veritable revolution in how we think, because for several decades now we have been concerned by the destruction of biodiversity, alarmed by climate change and global warming, and so we are paying more and more attention to animal behaviour, to the ecology of living species, to the physicality of the planet and to the changing climate.

The fact that entities other than humans are sending us information allows us to consider the world differently to how we have done in the past. In the past, we considered the world to be an array of passive objects, and now we genuinely take them to be our partners in global conservation.

MZ: I’d like to talk more about the notion of listening, and taking part in a genuine conversation – how do we listen, and what does that involve in your scheme of the cosmos?

MS: I think listening is a good metaphor. I really do believe that we receive signals from the world. Naturally we hear its background noise, or chaos if you will, but we also hear all kinds of other signals: from the Big Bang, from distant galaxies, etc. As a result, the whole science of cosmology revolves around listening to these signals, and processing them. And this is of course true of many other sciences. I believe that the world emits noise and transmits signals to us, and that listening to those signals is the very essence of science.

MZ: Now I’m interested in the signals, and that information relationship that every object in the world has – humans, inanimate objects, etc. Can you tell me a little bit more about what these signals are?

MS: Once you consider all the sciences together it becomes quite clear that optics studies signals from the visual world, acoustics studies signals from the auditory world and that all the sciences occupy a sort of region on the signal scale. There are non-visible signals, visible signals, signals which can only be heard with highly sophisticated apparatus and so on – do you see what I mean? So I think you can do something like a classification of the sciences along the scale of possible signals.

MZ: What would this scale of possible signals look like? How do we understand these signals in their own terms, and not for our benefit or exploitation?

MS: This is a question that very much piqued my interest, because entities other than human do indeed send us signals. How then do we hear them? What are these signals? Et cetera. It’s quite simple – the answer is an easy one: it goes back to Galileo’s explanation that the world is written in the language of mathematics. The language of mathematics encompasses all of these signals, which is how it gives us acoustics and optics, and even a discipline called signal processing. As a result, it can be said that mathematics is the language of the world. And that is a true miracle, and a true paradox, because the more abstract mathematics becomes, the more it deals with the most concrete, the most subtly concrete things in the world. This is what Einstein said, namely, that the mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Thinking in the world
• PART ONE Thinking worlds
• PART TWO Senses of place
• PART THREE Extended minds and bodies
• PART FOUR Technologies
• PART FIVE Creativity
• PART SIX Spectrums of experience
• PART SEVEN Economies, ecologies, politics
• Index
• Copyright