Bacteria, fungus, whale, sequoia – we do not know any life of which we cannot say that it emits information, receives it, stores it and processes it.1 Four universal rules, so incontrovertible that, by them, we are tempted to define life but we are unable to do so because of the following counterexamples. Crystal and, indeed, rock, sea, planet, star, galaxy – we know no inert thing of which we cannot say that it emits, receives, stores and processes information. Four universal rules, so uniform that we are tempted to define anything in the world by them but are unable to do so because of the following counterexamples. Individuals, but also families, farms, villages, cities and nations – we do not know any human, alone or in groups, of whom we cannot say that they emit, receive, store and process information.
These four rules of information (defined, in turn, by its rarity) change the idea we have had of thinking and, likewise, the subject–object relationship. Because information circulates universally within and between the totality of all existing things, we really cannot say that we are as exceptional as we think we are. What is thinking, if not at least carrying out these four operations: receiving, emitting, storing and processing information like all existing things? There is no doubt that we do not really know that we think like the world because we have been separated from it – by a colossal temporal chasm2 of millions or thousands of years. There is no doubt that we do not really know that we think like the living because we have been separated from them by a colossal temporal chasm of millions or thousands of years.
Better yet, if thinking means inventing, what is left to say? Emitting information that becomes increasingly rare, increasingly controlled during the emission, increasingly independent from the reception, storage and process, increasingly removed from its balance. So dive into bifurcations, branches, yes, real inventions that emerge in the ‘grand narrative’3 of the Universe or the Evolution of life.
By the way, what is a computer? A machine that emits, receives, stores and processes information, a strange machine with four universal rules – a universal machine, which functions as a thing of the world or as you and me.
Common to everything that has had the chance to exist, information has nothing in common with what we call by that name; media channels overwhelm us every day with it. It is often reduced to dreary repetitions, ad nauseam, to announcements of corpses and disasters of power and death, while war and violence are ranked at the bottom of global causes of human deaths. The information that I am speaking of, instead, is closer to a rarity. Léon Brillouin defines it as the opposite of entropy, which is the characteristic of high energies. He even terms it ‘negentropy’.4 At the same time that the Industrial Revolution, based on thermodynamic science, comes to an end, a concept from that same science, but contradicting entropy, takes the relay. Just as entropy, in fact, reigns the ‘hard’, so is information equivalent to what I call the ‘soft’.
By soft age, I would willingly comprehend a time in which we finally understand that the four rules that I have set forth govern, and they always have governed, and they without doubt forever will govern all that, being contingent, has the rare chance to exist. This information circulates in the world of things and between living things as well as between us – humans – and it constitutes the bedrock of thinking.
Information, in its everyday sense, contradicts that sense several times: the repetitions are opposed to its rarity, as the identical is opposed to the new and death to life. In the sense of information theory, the information of the media thus provides mostly no information. Inversely, thinking means inventing: getting hold of rarity, discovering the secret of that which has the huge and contingent chance to exist or to be born tomorrow – natura, nature, means that which will be born.5 Such a secret allows us to understand that inventing or discovering requires the same effort for a similar result since everything that exists, contingently, has a given quantity of rarity, that is to say, something new.
Where does this information circulate? Basically, in networks. For a long time, I’ve been surprised by this recent form of circulation that is nonetheless quite ancient. The Roman roads already made one such information network, and a sizeable one, all around the Mediterranean, from Iran to Scotland, from the Danube to the Nile and to the Atlas Mountains. I would not be surprised if one day a specialist discovered the vague traces of comings and goings of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, depending on the seasons, fruits and game, before the agrarian settlement of the Neolithic period. For their part, ethnologists recognize the traces of various tribes in the Amazon rainforest whose marks reflect immemorial gaps, tied with ephemeral housings, through a forest allegedly known as ‘virgin’, though these identifiable passages reveal it to have been ‘cultivated’ and thus ‘cultural’ for a long time. From those distant moments and through ever-expanding spaces, we have continued to cover our landscapes and the portolans of the Silk Routes, of the Incas or of spices – of land, maritime, rail or air ways. We still decorate the planet with a web of hertz – an electronic web – with a thousand and one names, repeating, thereby, a hominid practice that is at least a thousand years and at most a million years old.
Even better, every life constructs itself from admirable networks whose number of paths and connections defies the combinatorial explosion and whose delicacy surprises us. Earth physics, or even chemistry, extracts refined details from it. These tangles bridge the hard sciences and the soft sciences, and the long duration of their form still distances them, a billion years from us. Nothing truly new under the sun, under the ‘yellow dwarf’6 lost in the giant network of singularities known by astrophysicists.
Information circulates through the inert, living and human world, where everything and everyone emits it, receives it, exchanges it, conserves it and processes it. Interactions are thus not only material, or hard, but they are also informational, or soft: interactions, for sure, of causes, forces and energies – but also interferences, interpretations and intersections of signs, codes, images, co-possibilities and filters.
Something powerfully new has emerged in our vision of the world: the universe is made up of matter and information, paired and without doubt inseparable. This means that all things express, in some way, other things and the world; all things conspire and consent to it. All things, in some way, perceive – see, write, read – just like us.
No, we are not so exceptional; we are not the only ones endowed with the capability to see, read or write: the wind traces its musical partition over the waves of the sea and the dunes of the desert; running water weaves rich branches of river-like arborescence; dust engraves cliffs that are already sculpted or drawn by erosion; by their distinctive style, earthquakes, fractures, hot spots, the low plate tectonics define the higher relief. The living leave their remains, be it only bones. Magnetism marks itself and remains etched on soft rock on its way to crystallization, indicating the time of its hardening; radioactivity counts time; the climate leaves traces in dust buried in the deep ice of the poles and the ice sheets; evolution deploys itself on organisms, more disparate than systemic. We are not the only ones endowed with the capability to count or remember; the trees calculate their years, crowned in their wood. Nor are we the only ones endowed with the capability to code; everything ultimately gets spelled out in the language of mathematics. I have already said that we think like the world; now I am saying that the world thinks like us.
The world, so here it is.
Dazzled with the light after so long a darkness … [the two heroes] thought at first they were the prey of some ecstatic illusion, so splendid and unexpected was the sight that greeted their eyes. They were in the center of an immense grotto. The ground was covered with fine sand bespangled with gold. The vault was as high as that of a Gothic cathedral, and stretched away out of sight into the distant darkness. The walls were covered with stalactites of varied hue and wondrous richness, and from them the light of the torches was reflected, flashing back with all the colors of the rainbow, with the glow of a furnace fire and the wealth of the aurora. Colors of the most dazzling, shapes the most extraordinary, dimensions the most unexpected, distinguished these innumerable crystals. They were not, as in most grottoes, pendants, monotonously similar to each other, but nature had given free scope to fancy, and seemed to have exhausted every combination of tint and effect to which the marvelous brilliancy of the rocks could lend itself.
Blocks of amethyst, walls of sardonyx, masses of rubies, needles of emeralds, colonnades of sapphires deep and slender as forest pines, bergs of aquamarine, whorls of turquoise, mirrors of opal, masses of rose gypsum, and gold-veined lapis lazuli all that the crystal kingdom could offer that was precious and rare and bright and dazzling had served as the materials for this astonishing specimen of architecture; and, further, every form, even of the vegetable kingdom, seemed to have been laid under contribution in the wondrous work. Carpets of mineral mosses soft and velvety as the finest gauze, crystalline trees loaded with flowers and fruits of jewels recalling the fairy gardens of Japanese art, lakes of diamonds, palaces of chalcedony, turrets and minarets of beryl and topaz, rose pile upon pile, and heaped together so many splendors that the eye refused to grasp them. The decomposition of the luminous rays by the thousands of prisms, the showers of brilliancy that flashed and flowed from every side, produced the most astonishing combination of light and color that had ever dazzled the eyes of man.
—Jules Verne, The Star of the South7
Jules Verne’s cave reverses the Platonic one.8 The latter sings the glory of one sun, discovered in the daylight, as one emerges from the shadow, while the former is an invitation to penetrate under a vault that is so deep that one’s gaze is as lost as if it stared at a starry sky: Here, in this cave, a thousand lights dazzle the thinker.
Philosophy loves light and has turned it into the model of excellent knowledge, especially the splash of daytime sunshine. Sparkling with truth, light is supposed to chase away the darkness of obscurantism. That is an absurd and rather counter-intuitive idea, as we all know that any candle, as weakly as it may shine, immediately pushes back the shadow of the night, while no one has ever seen darkness overcome any source of light. This ideology is terrifying because if we turn the day into the champion of knowledge, we are left with only one unique and totalitarian truth, as hard and unsubtle as the sun at high noon, the star that astrophysics has eventually confined to the minor rank of the yellow dwarf. I say no to this tyranny, no to the yellow dwarfs.
Thus the day makes us believe in the unicity of truth. In fact, thinking is much less like the day than like the night, where every star shines like a diamond, where every galaxy flows like a river of pearls, where every planet, like a mirror, reflects the light it receives. Thus authentic knowledge overflows with results and intuitions; it sets up multiple reference points grouped into constellations with forms that are as disparate as those of scholarly disciplines. Thus knowledge finds temporary truths, whose luxuriously coloured sparkle flickers and changes with the duration of the Great Story. The only lights that do not tremble emanate from planets without an original brilliance and that, as I said, behave like mirrors. Magnificent, but modest enough to be reduced to the punctual – punctuated, however, by the blue supergiants, Vega or Rigel, and the heads of the ogre in the manner of Antares. Great in size but wavering in doubt and questioning, those truth-stars stand out against the enormous black background of non-knowledge, empty without limitations or full of yet unexplored galaxies: things still to be understood and to be grasped.
The gap between day and night spells the difference between cruel ideology and just knowledge that is right, evident, multiple, precise and ever-evolving. Shimmering with the brightness of billions of glorious, colourful and modest suns, the night with its countless truths resembles the high cave and its shining gems. In that space thinking flickers, too, as soft as the milk of its pearls and the brilliance of its diamonds. More beautiful than the day, peaceful by all means, the star-studded, pensive and soft night is a better model of knowledge than the sun-struck, cruel, exclusive, eye-hurting, ideologically prone and opinion-ridden light of day.
FROM ROTATING REVOLUTIONS TO AN EXPANDING UNIVERSE
To the Platonic ideology of a single sun-struck truth, Immanuel Kant added an image of such a high degree of narcissism that it should have worried the wise. Brightly positioned in those days at the centre of the world, the sun became, in his philosophy, the very subject of knowledge: the ‘Sun-Ego’,9 in a word. One can barely resist the impulse to burst out laughing at the sight of such a paranoid scheme, whose lack of modesty ends up putting each one of us on the throne of a king. Let’s say no to the dwarf who believes himself to be the tyrant of knowledge. This self-revolving world, that may have once been revolutionary, now seems all too narrow.
A laughable scheme it is, too, as astrophysics introduced us to a trillion galaxies, blue supergiants, black holes and other singularities in great numbers inhabiting a universe, deprived of a centre or endowed with multiple centres, decorated with precious gems, as Verne would have it. Visible only at times and at night. To account for Kant, in my view, those suns, in their own way, know and see.
Verne’s cave reverses the Platonic one by constructing a reduced model of the outside world, which is composed, at least in this case, of crystal, hard materials, corundum or beryl, but also of brilliant mirrors, sparkling flares and of luminous and coloured fireworks. They multiply each other’s reflections, emitting, receiving and exchanging millions of information items about themselves. Being media and messages, diamonds send the brilliance of sardonyx back to the lapis lazuli, while rubies reflect the flares of the aquamarines and emeralds mirror themselves in the large mirror of the topazes. Thousand substances maintain billions of exchanges and millions of reciprocal metamorphoses, like a network. Gems inform each other; they interact dialogically in a way, like we, and everything that lives, do.
This cave thus shows the reality of the world, fundamentally composed of hard and soft, of matter and mirrors, of things and reflections – like us and all that lives. The flashes of brilliance that traverse and compose space show, in turn, that the things of the world have, in their way, their own visions of the things of the world – like all of us. By being able to reflect them, any object can become the subject of other objects. Verne’s cave even shows the vision the universe has of itself. Once they get in there, as valuable as these stones and their reflections are, do the two heroes metamorphose into diamonds?
They discover the bottom of a cornucopia, rich and saturated with material and informational plenitude that represents both the world as it is and the joyful splendour of thinking. I do not see any difference anymore between reality and representation, since the latter is part of the former. Like the two heroes, like anything in the world, like everything that lives, I am a diamond, made of hard carbon that is at times pure, transparent or granular, reflecting a thousand times over the thousand and one hues of the rainbow, shining out of the multiple things of the world and of the thousands of people and living things I have ever met. Matter and mirror, media and messages, white and sprouting multiple colour lines, a bedecked gamut of a thousand reflections – I, too, am the cornucopia, the multiplicity of reality downstream and the possibility of limits upstream. Like everyone else.
The second acrimonious battle10 that has waged for centuries, and does so even today, between the materialists and the champions of the spirit would have made Lucretius and Democritus11 smile. In accordance with Jules Verne’s cave and the vision that the world has of itself, they both claimed that the atoms of matter combine themselves in the same way as the letters of an alphabet form meaningful words or absurd assemblages that they are the first to reject. In other words, the atoms encode. Material elements perform as well as signs; they inform each other mutually, elect each other, choose each other, reflect each other and repel each other, like the diamonds in that cave of wonders, like all molecules do, like the codes of the living combine with each other and eliminate each other. Therefore their world, just like ours, is conspiring and consenting; it is woven with disparate encodings and composites arranged in networks.
They encode, we encode; they count, we count; we speak, they speak. Knowledge is thus the ability to listen and translate the scattered languages of things. They usually speak mathematics.
NOTES
In the original title ‘L’information et la pensée’, the word ‘la pensée’ plays with thought as a doctrine and thought as a faculty. By translating ‘la pensée’ as ‘thinking’, the English title focuses upon thought as a creative, active and endless process.
1Emitting, receiving, storing and processing information traditionally only applies to our memory or the functioning of computers.
2In psychoanalysis, this temporal chasm prevents us from genuinely engaging with events from the past.
3Michel Serres rehabilitates a historiographic discourse by playing with Jean-François Lyotard’s acclaimed notion of the end of the ‘grand narratives’.
4In Léon Brillioun’s information theory, the term ‘entropy’ is applied to uncertainty and the term ‘negentropy’ (negative entropy) is used for information. In this definition, entropy and negentropy should ceaselessly collaborate in order to decrease uncertainty.
5The word natura is the future tense of the verb nascor and can, indeed, be translated as ‘what is to be born’.
6‘The Yellow Dwarf’ (‘La nain jaune’) is a fairy tale by Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville (Baroness d’Aulnoy) and was published in 1698. The story stages a jealous and vile yellow dwarf who constantly manipulates the course of fate. The similarly called ‘Game of the Yellow Dwarf’ is a traditional and popular French card game where one has to frustrate one’s opponents by starting sequences of cards that are not yet formed. Apart from the fairy tale and the card game, a G-type main-sequence star is also called a ‘yellow dwarf’.
7Jules Verne, The Star of the South. Trans. and Ed. by Charles F. Horne (New York: Vincent Parke, 1911), 276–77.
8Plato’s metaphor of the cave is also an exposition of his theory of Ideas. These transcendent Ideas represent a more fundamental, true and accurate reality.
9Michel Serres linguistically alludes to the absolutism of the ‘Roi-Soleil’ by using the word ‘Moi-Soleil’ as a critique of the philosophy of Kant.
10Michel Serres uses the French expression ‘bataille picrocholine’ alluding to the obscure war between Picrochole against Grandgousier in Rabelais’s novel Gargantua (1534). The French expression is used to designate a silly conflict between nations or individuals that has no significant cause.
11Democritus, a Greek atomist philosopher, and Lucretius, a Roman materialist philosopher, both considered the world, nature and man as an accidental clashing of atoms. Serres, in his book La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce (Minuit: 1977. Translated as The Birth of Physics, Clinamen Press: 2001), revalues and revitalizes these atomist thoughts.
Verne, Jules. The Star of the South. Trans. and Ed. Charles F. Horne. New York: Vincent Parke, 1911: 276–77.