Branches

A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent

Michel Serres

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781474297523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Despite being one of France's most enduring and popular philosophers, Branches is the first English translation of what has been identified as Michel Serres' key text on humanism. In attempting to reconcile humanity and nature, Serres examines how human history 'branches' off from its origin story. Using the metaphor of a branch springing from the stem and arguing that the branch's originality derives its format, Serres identifies dogmatic philosophy as the stem, while philosophy as the branch represents its inventive, shape-shifting, or interdisciplinary elements. In Branches, Serres provides a unique reading of the history of thought and removes the barriers between science, culture, art and religion. His fluency and this fluidity of subject matter combine here to make a book suitable for students of Continental philosophy, post-humanism, the medical humanities and philosophical science, while providing any reader with a wider understanding of the world in which they find themselves.

Narrative

Event

Ordinary peoples, criminal and peaceful, had farmed the low-lying plains to the north of the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara for generations. Suddenly, the Bosporus cork gave way. A mass burst that no one had realized formed a dam, and, stemming from the Mediterranean, brackish torrents poured out in cataracts into this low country, inundating furrows and villages as they passed, likewise killing humans and animals. In less than ‘forty days and forty nights’, a small lake widened to the dimensions of the Black Sea. This event took place in the now dated times of deglaciation, during which similar populations, residing at the bottom of the Strait of Dover, witnessed, just as powerless, an irresistible invasion of water. Whether geologists or prehistorians, some people imagine that the Bible recorded the Eastern European event under the name and via the story of Noah. For over the course of the preceding weeks, an astute sage could have heard the high barrier cracking and persuaded his family and friends to prepare for catastrophe; Noah, a son saved amid the dead and a father of the survivors.

How should we define an event? As that bomb whose contingent newness interrupts a state of affairs that has been formatted for a long enough time to make people believe in its perenniality: a people was going about its business in calm, it disappeared; one family alone remained; an ancient lake of reduced dimensions expanded; a fragment of history bifurcated.

Rare, news of this type astounds when it is told; it tears apart the old formats.

The consequences of the event

Supposing the experts were not mistaken about the reality or the date of this event, nor about its interpretation, not only is the rupture of the Bosporus interesting to those men or women who were unaware of it and thereby learn that such climatic fluctuations can return, but this rupture in truth also had an enormous impact: it destroyed the civilization whose ruins we discover on submerged shores; it reshaped a notable part of the global map and opened Russia up to the sea by giving rise to new maritime exchanges; it staged a hero whose role as a new Adam caused exegetes to ponder …; in short, it renewed our view of time and the face of the Earth. Strictly physical, the event had a historical and religious effect.

When, translated into the majority of languages, the Bible penetrated cultures and mentalities, the story of Noah (the deluge, the bank-ark of visible living things and the invention of the first biotechnology, wine, through domestication of an invisible ferment …) spread even farther than the waters. Supposing, I repeat, that the aforementioned rupture truly took place, there and during the times stated, the consequences of the event surpassed the simple mechanical effect, whether physical or one of terror, that could be brought about by cascade or cataract. The verb ‘surpass’, used intentionally here, doesn’t merely designate the quantity or volume of action, but also a change of nature and quality: the appearance of space and the direction of history. The map of Eurasia was redrawn; some people even started human history from zero or saw it deviate. Global and cultural consequences ensue from a physical and local event: from one format, another one.

Causes

Are there other events, comparable, that, by their strength, seem to be an exception to the usual chain of causes, in which consequences are equivalent to their conditions, in which the entire effect is found in the full cause? The physics of the Earth dates five eradications of the majority of living things fairly exactly, catastrophes due, it seems, to volcanism or an aerolite strike, a normal eruption or a chance impact bringing about what could be called a nuclear winter; the dust made to shoot up into the atmosphere by these occasions, put into orbit, plunged the globe into a long and icy night. Local cause, universal effect; physical cause, biological effect. The consequences bifurcate in nature as well as in scope.

What should we call an event? When known causes unfold in such a way that the expected effects remain similar to what precedes, the sequence plunges into a format that’s predictable by the ordinary rule of causality: the hours follow one another, duration flows; everyone gets bored or lives their share of happiness. But should a colossal occurrence suddenly arise that brings about unexpected effects in size or nature, and should the monotonous format of previous rules deviate, in direction for example, then we call them events.

I am now talking about them and newness.

On little causes

Am I mistaken? The millions of horsepower unfolded by the Bosporus rupture, the impact of an aerolite in Mexico or Siberia, ten volcanic eruptions in Iceland or the Sunda Islands can, by their power, produce a thousand devastating effects, and universal to boot. So these events could be used as examples of the normal development of the ordinary format: tremendous causes, enormous effect. But there are other ones where the strength of the causes diminishes down to the minimum and even to zero and whose effects nonetheless surpass all proportion.

Thus history, both Roman and universal, deviated at the sight of Cleopatra’s nose, whose curve was appreciated by Caesar and Antony in turn.¹ Causes with almost zero strength or actions that are ridiculous today, becoming decisive tomorrow, will produce effects that shake singular existences and global empires. Who can be certain that the Soviet regime wasn’t shaken at all by the Vatican institution, so weak that Stalin derisively asked how many divisions it had? Who knows how to weigh the power of a symbol that is apparently without any strength?

Can we assess the consequences of words? A piece of gossip grows into rumour and, spreading into slander, drives a victim to suicide. Who can predict this propagation? The remark kills: unexpected, the effect surpasses tremendously an imponderable cause. Do words change the human adventure? The fact that reading shapes the body, decides actions and enchants the world is shown by Don Quixote. Historians have trouble filling this gap between heavy consequences and the lightness of language. Who can evaluate the effectiveness of an announcement, of a lie, of a truth? We rarely master the effects of our productions, whether words or things.

Nature and cultures

We also don’t always know how to assess the consequences of our equations: words and phrases from another language. Newton discovered universal gravitation; ever since then, no one sees the sky or the stars in the same way, nor the Earth or the apples in the yard. Conceive of grace as the opposite of gravity. Three letters, a sign and a figure (e = mc ² ) provided us with the access key to forces from which we drew bombs destructive enough for the terror caused by them to change international relations. In manipulating the atom, the chain of genes or cloning bacteria …, aren’t we playing with fire? We have risked fires ever since the supposed domestication of flames; neglected, a match can set hectares aflame.

We shall soon laugh at those who told of mastering technologies. Who can guess if and how some object, common however and come from our industry, can be diverted someday into a symbol, an icon, nay, into a divinity? Our ancestors venerated, it is said, fetishes-logs that they had just cut; worse, they sometimes sacrificed their children to them; the blind worship of certain products of our economy kills our families on the freeways. Fearing seeing their statues move, the Greek sometimes covered them with chains. What could be more commonplace than to adore idols sculpted by our hands or banal stars on brightly coloured advertisements?

A flint knife hunts but also murders. The pursuit of aurochs helped them survive; was this pursuit running towards the eradication of the species? Who knows? What we shape and think we master departs to seek its fortune in the world, being born to a life of its own. The anxiety attached to the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice has affected Homo faber from its first productions and haunted our technologies and our sciences all the way up to this morning.

Generalization

The reader might be surprised that the preceding pages went from casual slander to scientific formulas, and lastly to our fabrications in general. All these examples are united by the break in proportion between little causes and gigantic consequences, whether favourable or disastrous, a union resulting from linking the scale of information, so delicate it plunges down to the minuscule weaknesses that are verbal utterances or psychological energies, to the scale we started from, that of earthquakes.

For we also don’t always know how to assess the consequences of a purely physical phenomenon: thus, before chaos theory, Poincaré demonstrated that the Earth could, without warning, leave the solar system and depart, it too, to seek its fortune in the world. So the cause quits the enormous so as to descend, even in mechanics, to the imperceptible and join there, in the minuscule, Cleopatra and slander. Laugh at historians who remain deterministic in human affairs, while the hardest sciences accept that unpredictable effects linked to initial conditions that can’t be perceived by the most minute observation can occur.

The loop closes: the same disproportion can affect inert and human-caused phenomena just as much; from the most imperceptible to the astronomical, from nature to cultures, on every scale of force …, the possibility of a gap between cause and consequence can be found. A tiny mutation can lead to the emergence of a living species whose numbers will occupy the globe. The concept of event becomes universal. While it used to seem so slight and circumstantial … that, to express these qualities, we said ‘event-oriented’ [événementiel], it is now losing its character of being an exception so as to join, if not a rule, at least a crowd. This book celebrates the access of contingent singularities to the universal. Narrative unites with the law.

The observer and his interest

I just talked about things themselves as though no one was perceiving them. Yet an event is measured in relation to the interest an observer takes in it. If he gets bored, he will run to the news; so an unexpected announcement interests him: yesterday morning, Santorini exploded, destroying the Minoan culture; yesterday evening, Newton invented universal gravitation … The interest increases with the newness; the subject no longer gets bored.

But how does he recognize an event? If the occurrence that happened maintains no relation with his previous experience, will it interest him? Who among his family gave credence to Noah’s apocalyptic opinions, alone with his ark on his hands? There was no prophet in the region … But shepherds must also have already, for a long time, raised livestock on the narrow shores of the old Black Sea for the cataract to have devastated their history. Please reread, above, the two first sentences: … for generations. Suddenly … Here are the two acts of the event: before it, a kind of monotonous format reigned, inducing habit or boredom, and, all of a sudden, a contingent break occurs in this regime. Is it truly a matter of a totally new thing?

Not really: every bifurcation displays two stems. Scientists before Newton must have already asked a few questions and missed the right answer regarding the cause of motion; houses, palaces, a noteworthy social organization and a few fumaroles must have appeared on the island of Thera; the victims of a love-at-first-sight thunderbolt must have experienced two or three things regarding love … Does newness descend from the sky, indecipherable? Not really. Granted, the Greek language was ignorant of the word volcano; granted, astrobiology claims that the first coded RNAs arrived on Earth on board aerolites …, but, most of the time, the news maintains some relation with a usage that precedes it and which the news shakes up. Something exists beforehand, which the bifurcation disfigures. A father dictates the law; his son disobeys it.

When Saint Paul announced the Good News, he grafted the Christian branch onto the Jewish tree and its Pharisean bough; the graft was born on the rootstock. ‘If you, being cut off a wild olive tree to which you belong by nature, have been, contrary to your nature, grafted onto a cultivated olive tree, how much better would these natural branches be grafted onto their own olive tree to which they belong by nature!’ (Rom. 11.24). In the shape of a ramification, each of these examples, chosen deliberately for their difference in nature or cultures, presents a stem, stable, and a branch, new.

Action and thought

Just as the event, universal and singular, in fact traverses every scale of power, from the colossal to the minimal, so it crosses the border separating the raw occurrence, in which a new thing separates off from the format, separating the raw occurrence, as I was saying, from the observer wakened by the news. He who gets bored experiences the uniformity of a sequence of repeated occurrences; strong and keen, on the contrary, interest suddenly springs up when the newness of the event shoots up from the rule …, when the graft diverges from the rootstock. Leaping from his torpor to the news, the observer finds himself torn and divided on this double schema, along with the things around him, things subjected to a suddenly broken law. The explosion of a seventh chord breaks up the greyness, and the ear wakes up. This book celebrates the waking at the fork-point between the stem and the branch because these days we are living on this double point of tangency, from which the word contingency was derived.

So not only does the observer get up from bed but so does the possible actor. Who can assess the effectiveness of his practices on things, living beings, humans and circumstances? Vast investments prove to be powerless; a flick of a finger decides a triumph. However powerful he may see h imself, the master has less power than he thinks; however weak we may see ourselves, each of us has more power than we think. However feeble my weakness may be experienced to be, more strength comes from my arm than from a butterfly’s wing; if this wing can trigger a hurricane, what will my fingers be able to achieve? Neither the tyrant nor the slave assesses their scope. Tomorrow, the former will fall, of himself, and the latter will scorn taking power in order to try to establish a less stupid world.

Jubilation, gambling

This ignorance of the effect … inspires hope for action, joyous decision, freedom of destiny. Through the inexpertise it grants me, contingency gives rise to an inexhaustible jubilation of willing, thinking, undertaking. A solitary essayist throws his works out like dice; it’s tough luck if he doesn’t write Phèdre, at least he will have lived, that is to say, attempted. Within every newborn, the adventure of the Messiah, hoped for or already come, is at stake. We don’t so much live plunged in a fated sequence of predictable causes, in an incontestably necessary real … as in an extraordinary game of chance in which the actual and the probable can lose their weight of seriousness in relation to the inactual, the symbolic, the unexpected, the invented at leisure, the mad and the weak. Something that, here and now, appears dramatic and pressing disappears into smoke a bit later, and something whose importance no one sees becomes, patiently or lightning fast, the most important thing. Today’s necessary quickly turns into the impossible, and the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• System
• Narrative
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Copyright