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PAUL GALVEZ: You have described the world as ruled
by owsby turbulence, percolation, disorder, and
uncertaintyrather than by linear progress or
orderly systems. And, in fact, much of your work
revolves around the ultimate form of turbulence:
disaster. Youve said that your philosophy really
comes from the moment of Hiroshima. So I wanted
to ask, rst of all: Do you think that there are events,
like 9/11 or other acts of terrorism, in our present day
that have as enormous an impact now as Hiroshima
did at the time? Is the historical limitthe unthink-
ablestill that of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, or, in
the twenty-rst century, must we confront a new era,
new regimes, new congurations of disaster, politics,
and philosophy? What is different now?
MICHEL SERRES: One way to understand the dif-
ferences between the two catastrophes, between
Hiroshima in 1945 and the terrorism of today, is in
terms of scale and quantication, and thus in terms
of our entire relationship to knowledge. On the one
hand, Hiroshima was a massive single event, and it
was at the end of the rst truly global war. It became
symbolic of what we thought about science, speci-
cally the advent of big science, large-scale initia-
tives like the Manhattan Project, research involving
thousands of people, if not more, over the past century.
Which is to say that science, for just about everyone,
had been the bearer of progress, of civilization and
humanity; but all of a sudden, we realized that science
could produce a genuine catastrophe, like Hiroshima.
It made the unthinkable precisely thinkable. And that
was, for my generation, a very important rupture in the
relationship to scientic research, and so we invented
what we call today the ethics of science. In the end,
World War II produced some sixty million deaths.
That is a catalcysm that is so numerically great and so
horric that it exploded our entire comprehension of
scale, of magnitude, and of the capabilities of science.
With regard to terrorism today, I was struck by
recent reports concerning annual deaths and causes
of death. They present a classication of worldwide
catastrophesfor example, specic diseases, or viral
outbreaks charted by the World Health Organization
Second Nature
PAUL GALVEZ TALKS WITH MICHEL SERRES
Opposite page: Atomic bomb test
explosion, Nevada, ca. 1952. Photo:
Harold Edgerton/MIT Museum.
Microscopic view of dust debris
from the World Trade Centers
collapse on September 11, 2001.
Photo: David Scharf/Science
Faction/Corbis.
MICHEL SERRES is one of the most important philosophers of recent
decadesand yet he remains little known to the English-speaking world.
This may be partly because he is as much an aesthetic voice as he is an
analytical one: Celebrated for his pathbreaking work in the philosophy of
science, he has also deed that discipline with his singularly poetic language,
which is highly difcult to translate. Indeed, he has made one of his signature
subjects the mediation and translation between disparate elds and compe-
tencies, bringing together ecology and sociology, technology and culture,
physics and literature, mathematics and mythology (and invoking Hermes,
the messenger god, as his emblem of sorts). Taking his place in a radical
genealogy of thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard and Paul Feyerabend, Serres
has had a decisive impact, felt in the work of Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze,
Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers, and Bernard Stiegler, among others.
Serres has audaciously bridged nature and mind; animal and mineral; being
and matter; and our notions of time, sensation, causality, and power. For
him, turbulence is all. Fluid dynamics and the thermodynamics of entropy
and Brownian motion are not only scientic phenomena but powerful tools
for explaining the world at large. In other words, against the linear trajectory
of scientic progress and traditional understandings of time and motion,
Serres posits a universe full of eddies, uctuations, and currents, so that,
against the Heraclitan proverb, one may in fact step in the same river
twicefor a river is dened by recursion, repetition, and nonlinear spirals
rather than a smooth path into the future. This is what Serres terms liquid
historya view that is nondeterministic, multiplicitous, chaotic, resolutely
materialist; that perceives complexity and crisis; that takes into account
local disturbances as much as long-term glacial or geologic change. And
perhaps this is why Serres has become one of the most visionary and eloquent
observers of the profound instabilities arising in the postwar period. As he
wrote in 1990,
We are now, admittedly, the masters of the Earth and of the world,
but our very mastery seems to escape our mastery. We have all things
in hand, but we do not control our actions. Everything happens as though
our powers escaped our powerswhose partial projects, sometimes
good and often intentional, can backre or unwittingly cause evil. . . .
Our conquests outstrip our deliberate intentions.
For this issue of Artforum, art historian and critic PAUL GALVEZ spoke to
Serres in Paris about contemporary intersections between nature, tech-
nology, science, and culture, and about our eras unforeseen innovations
and unprecedented risks.
SEPT.feat.SERRES.indd 361 8/7/13 1:21 PM
362 ARTFORUM
and then events like car accidents, which are the
cause of more than one million deaths per year and
forty million injuries. And terrorism actually comes
in last, with about fteen thousand deaths. So todays
media obviously overevaluates the risks of terrorism,
creating an industry of fear. We talk about it every day
and constantly prepare ourselves for it, even though
terrorism is much less widespread, in totality, than the
press coverage suggests. Of course, that doesnt dis-
count the extreme violence around the world, the state
of seemingly perpetual conict in which we live and
the terrible individual toll that takes, but the total
magnitude is of a different order than that of the
world war. Between Hiroshima and terrorism now,
there is a difference both in quantity and in kind.
PG: There are also, as youve said, disasters that are
not as spectacular, that may even be imperceptible, but
are more long-range. And they are perceived as natu-
ral but could also be linked to human acts or error.
MS: Well, yes. Now we must confront climate
change, accidents, the extinction of species, the
destruction of the entire environment. And thats
a catastrophe that we rarely perceive day-to-day,
or perceive largely in abstract terms, but that is of
the magnitude ofand poses as many dilemmas
asHiroshima.
PG: You have long stressed the theme of return, the
almost inevitable presence of archaism, in the tech-
nological realm. We see this emphasis when you
argue for the real connections between Lucretius and
contemporary physics, but also when you invoke the
metaphor of the car: A car is an object that seems to
be new, but that in fact is an assemblage of different
technologies produced in vastly different timesthe
prehistoric wheel, the midcentury automatic trans-
mission, the GPS. Yet this notion that the present is
permeated by the past is different from the idea that
history is a cycle, that there is nothing really new under
the sun. It seems important to grasp this distinction.
MS: Indeed, theres an extraordinary, unprecedented
difference between the recent past and the contem-
porary age. Now, I think were actually in a period
of peace thats also one of decisive transformation.
For example, in the US, at the beginning of the
twentieth century, about half the population were
farmers. Today, only 1 percent are farmers. And
when I was born, in 1930, there were just over two
billion people in the world. Today, there are seven
billion. So in my own lifetimeover the course of
one human lifethe worlds population has multi-
plied by nearly four. Life expectancy dramatically
increased almost everywhere. Whats more, as part
of these entirely new developments, there are of
course radically new technologies. As a result, the
difference between the time of my childhood and
today is probably as pronounced as the one that
separated the Middle Ages and the quattrocento.
PG: But do you nd that even now, there is a return
of ritual, of myth, of atavistic violence? What do you
mean by archaism in terms of technology? The clear-
est example of that, probably, is the Holocaust,
which has been understood both as the epitome of
modernity and as an eruption of something primal
of barbarism, as Walter Benjamin famously argued.
And fascism literally paraded its technological moder-
nity via reference to past glories and an almost cult-
ish devotion to the racial purity of the Volk.
MS: What I call archaism today would instead be the
spectacle of terror, of guns, of killing machines.
Thats our archaism: We only talk about terror and
pity. Its the archaism of human sacrice, quite sim-
ply, of Abraham. Yet Western nations have not been
at war with each other for seventy years, which has
not happened in millennia, since the Trojan War.
That is only the Pax Americana of the West, of
course, but it is still a remarkable span of time. Weve
been at peace for seventy years, and we only talk
about catastrophes.
PG: One of your most famous, and controversial,
moves was in fact to draw a comparison between
modern technological accidents and archaic sacrice.
You compare the Challenger space shuttle explo-
sion to the ancient ritual of Baal: The Carthaginians
would sacrifice children and animals by placing
them in an enormous statue of the god Baal and
burning them alivean act that is uncannily paral-
leled in the Challenger disaster, in the tremendous
cost of engineering and building these vessels, the
ceremonial event, the witnessing crowds, the terrify-
ing symbolic power. And the denial entailed in sacred
violence is paralleled in modern technological acci-
dents, which we know will occur because they are
statistically inevitable.
But youre as much a scientist as a philosopher of
the sciences. Do you think that the sciences are pre-
pared to study and potentially solve these perpetual
disasters, or is it, in fact, the sciences that are con-
demned to perpetuate or even cause these crises,
whether climate change or technological failure?
MS: Well, on the one hand, science is the reason for
our greater life expectancy. And whats destroying
the climate, for instance, is not necessarily science:
Its also the economy, industry, business, and nance.
It was in fact scientists who rst sounded the alarm
about the problem of the environment and ecological
destruction, who rst warned us, Watch out, were
in danger, you see. It was the scientists who threw
that situation into relief.
PG: Yes, of course, the problem is not necessarily
exclusive to the sciences. . . . Its a question that
exceeds scientic thought.
MS: This is exactly what I argue in Bioge [Biogea,
Not only can nature be considered
a subject of law, but it should be
considered as a subject, period:
It is full of information and we
must listen to it. Michel Serres
Rendering of the predicted growth
of Los Alamos National Laboratory
in New Mexico between 1948 and
1951. Photo: David Leydenfrost/
Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
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2012]. The book is a call to listen to what is said both
by living beings and the planet. It means letting the
planet speak.
PG: The fundamental question posed in Bioge is:
What is the role of nature today? What should it be?
Its different from the natural law of the Enlightenment,
from the law of progress. Is the role of nature for you
now different even from its theorization in your early
writings (such as La Naissance de la physique [The
Birth of Physics, 1977])?
MS: Well, in Le Contrat naturel [The Natural
Contract, 1990], I argued that it was necessary to
have a contract with nature, and that nature had to
be considered as a subject of law. I was criticized
heavily at the time because I was entertaining the
idea that nature could be subject to law. But in
Bioge, I am even more adamant. I say that not only
can nature be considered a subject of law, but it should
be considered a subject, period; that is to say, it is full
of information and we must listen to it. As a result,
in many of the texts in Bioge, I aim to let the earth
speak; I let the wind speak, I let the ocean speak, I let
living beings speak. As if Bioge was listening to what
nature tells us. And this has nothing to do with nature
in the eighteenth-century sense, which was a kind of
decor, if you will, for human life. Rousseau, and in
fact everyone who talks about nature in the eigh-
teenth century, posits a version of a contract with
nature as a master-slave relation. Whereas now, quite
the opposite: Its a partner, you see? Its not decor, its
a partner. Its not an environment, its something that
resembles us.
PG: I agree that Rousseaus conception of nature is
wholly different from yours, but when you talk
about communicating with nature like a person,
in fact it sounds to me like nineteenth-century
Romanticism, which was in a certain way about ani-
mating nature like a person.
MS: Well, thats archaism right there. But unlike the
Romantics, many classical philosophers troubled
normal ideas about matter and agency. For example,
when [Gottfried Wilhelm] Leibniz speaks about
monadology, he says that monadswhich for him
constitute the atomic elements or building blocks of
the universeperceive, that they have perception. In
turn, take the notion of information today: Every
scientist agrees that a living being, whether its a
worm or even a monocellular organism or bacteria,
receives information, emits information, stores infor-
mation, and processes information. What do we do
with information? We perform those four opera-
tions, like those entities: We receive information, we
emit information, we process information, and we
store information. As a result, there is something that
completely unies us with the inorganic elements of
nature, which Romanticism did not see at all, because
Above: Aerial view after atomic
bombing, Hiroshima, Japan, March
9, 1946. Photo: Bettmann/Corbis.
Below: Tsunami wave, Miyako City,
Iwate, Japan, March 11, 2011.
Photo: AFLO/Mainichi Newspaper/
EPA/Corbis.
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Romanticism, of course, was not advanced enough
from a scientific point of view to understand the
notion of information.
PG: Do you think, in fact, that nature and informa-
tion are not opposed? In other words, its not the
organic versus the synthetic, nature against tech-
nology or discourse?
MS: In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, objects
of nature or nonhuman living beings were considered
to be objects. We alone, we humans, were subjects,
and the rest of nature consisted of objects. I am trying
to change this subject/object relationship and give
nature the dignity of a subjectwhich changes the
denition of subjectivity itself. To see nature not only
as a subject of law but as a subject that processes
information. And there is progress there, in relation
to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notions of
nature, a progress that both militated against and was
due to advances in the sciences. Science is what allows
us to understand in a profound way what I called the
new animism, or a new kind of materialism.
PG: But is there a danger in this new animism, a
return of the repressed? A return of institutions that
are very, very conservative and traditional? In other
words, this is what resembles nineteenth-century
Romanticism, no? A return to the origin, a return to
foundations, that is ahistorical? Indeed, this would
seem to be the complete opposite of the atomist
materialism that you have put forth elsewherethe
nonlinear, resolutely nonanthropomorphic, contin-
gent universe that Lucretius described. Is the idea of
a new animism not a denial of materiality in favor of
a kind of stealth anthropomorphism? In which
objects are ultimately just treated like subjects
(unlike, for example, in Bruno Latours notion of the
absolute symmetry, the absolute parity, of subjects
and objects)? And is there a danger of this contradic-
tion in the current environmental movement?
MS: Thats very hard to answer for the following rea-
son: The so-called political movements of environ-
mentalism, for example, use the word ecology, but
ecology has two meanings. First, its the name for a
very complex set of sciences, which were invented in
Madison, Wisconsin, and in Montpellier, France, at
the same time, at the end of the nineteenth century.
The ecological sciences require great competence. But
then there are the ecological movements, which are
maintained by people who are rarely competent in
that science. So there are two meanings to the word,
the scientic meaning and the lay one. There is often
a serious gap between what the scientists of ecology
say and what the political movements do. And therein
lies the difculty of our current world.
PG: So, for example, the movement to protect agri-
culture and organic farming in the US and in Europe
often becomes a kind of protectionism that preserves
the current state of industrialized agriculture without
thinking about its long-term consequences, other
than perhaps future prots.
MS: Exactly.
PG: And that gap between what is said and done
the bifurcation of language, of practical discourse
and philosophical or scientic terms, is a central
topic in Bioge. So I wondered about the style of the
book. Youre well known for a specic and special
way of writing. But when I read certain passages,
they very much reminded me of Gaston Bachelards
writing, especially his work on the natural elements.
At the very moment when
postmodern philosophers thought
that there werent any more great
narratives, science set out, on
the contrary, to build the greatest
narrative that had ever existed.
MS
Police search for missing persons
in tsunami debris, Minamisoma,
Fukushima, Japan, April 15, 2011.
Photo: AFLO/Nippon News/Corbis.
Thomas Hill, Emerald Bay,
Lake Tahoe, 1864, oil on canvas,
36
1
4 x 56
3
8".
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You have pioneered our modern understanding of
Bachelard, in fact, and I want to ask how, precisely,
you see your work in relation to his theorization of
the elements, which proposes a more dynamic rela-
tionship of human beings to the material world.
MS: We dont talk about the elements in the same
way. Whats remarkable in Bachelard is a very strong
rupture between scientic thought, on the one hand,
and poetic thought, on the other. Consequently, Ive
worked my entire life to remove that rupture, to
show that one single voice can speak about the ele-
ments both scientically and poetically. In Le Tiers-
instruit [The Instructed Third, 1991], I didwnt want
to separate scientic minds from literary minds, the
hard sciences from the social, but to bring them
together. My idea was reunion, not separation.
PG: For Bachelard, the poetic is that which is not sci-
ence. . . . The rupture with the sciences was complete.
In fact, you could say that the strengths and weak-
nesses of his work depend on the absolute nature of
this rupture or epistemic break. For Bachelard, litera-
ture safeguards the sensuous, interdependent synergy
between subject and object that modern science has
rendered inert. He did not see, as you do, any possibil-
ity of reconciliation between the sciences and the
humanities. But your work seems to posit a new epis-
teme, no? Does it have any relation to what has been
called the posthuman?
MS: Listen: All that post- vocabulary always made
me laugh, because the postmodernists think that
postmodernism is the end of great narratives. And to
make fun of them, I have continually taken pains to
explain just what the great narrative is: At the very
moment when postmodern philosophers thought
that there werent any more great narratives, science
set out, on the contrary, to build the greatest narra-
tive that had ever existed. It begins with the Big Bang,
15 billion years ago, and proceeds to chronicle the
formation of the earth, 4 billion years ago, the begin-
ning of life, 3.8 billion years ago, the evolution of
life, and, nally, prehistory and history. In other
words, today we have an enormous narrative at our
disposal that is also extremely precise from the point
of view of scientic reason. So today we are not at
the end of the great narrative but, on the contrary, at
the beginning of it. Our forefathers did not have that
kind of narrative in mind, that kind of temporality.
As a result, well, with regard to the post-something
vocabulary, I still have to laugh. Voil.
PG: Still, what youre saying reminds me of the last
chapter of Foucaults Les Mots et les choses [The
Order of Things, 1966], in which he talks about the
death of man, but it hasnt happened yet, so were
waiting for that in order to have a new era. Its a big
question, but Im going to ask it anyway: Do you
think Bioge gives an idea of what happens after the
death of man?
MS: Well, what dies in the era of Foucault is human-
ism. Humanism, which is founded on the vision of
the world in which man is exceptional and in which
man is the only one in nature. But the great narrative
that I just described shows that we have to build a
new humanism, one in which man is the equal part-
ner of all living beings and all things on the planet,
in the universe. Thats the goal of my work: to con-
struct a new humanism. The former humanism is
dead; like Narcissus, it was enthralled with its own
reectionit believed that man was exceptional, a
singularity in the universe. By the same token, anti-
humanism seems to throw the baby out with the
bathwater. But no, our destiny is a common destiny,
shared with all our living and nonliving partners on
Earth. Thats the new humanism. And Bioge tries
to begin to build it.
Translated from French by Molly Stevens.
Rendering of the early universe during star formation. Photo: Adolf Schaller/Space Telescope Science Institute/NASA.
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