How are we to be reborn? Through good encounter [encontre]
‘She came through the doorway, and, like lightning, I was struck by love at first sight,’ he says. Disquieted, he retracts this: ‘Have I really forgotten it?’ He nevertheless persists: ‘To my recollection, the passion that caused me to worry for so long began that morning, the one with the soft sunlight, light breeze and transparent September mist licking the tree in front of the house. Starting from that encounter [encontre], my life bifurcated.’ He returns to his doubts: ‘Nothing happened on that morning.’ Yet he affirms: ‘How can it be denied that there was a before and an after? The more time goes forward, the more importance this moment of nothingness takes on, which no doubt had no importance when it happened.’ Great loves begin with neither lightning nor strikes. With its prefix indicating repetition, rencontre [encounter] shows to those it causes to be born or reborn that they have forgotten their encontre, that is to say, the first time: always virgin at this advent.1
At the junction point between the twig and its stem, the event causes bifurcation; the advent, for its part, marks, on this same point, a birth. The event can remain sterile, whereas the advent produces; tearing up a monotonous format, the event emerges as an exception to a rule, a deviation from a habitual equilibrium, an interruption of a sequence; the head of a sequence, for its part, an exit, the advent causes, in addition, an existence to emerge, causes subjects, a history … to be born, soon to be equipped with long laws: production, origin, beginning …, the appearance of this rameau [branch], which, in French, has the same root as racine [root].
From where do these newnesses gush forth? Are they announced on dove’s feet, like a thief in the night?
Autocatalysis
There are no glaciers on the Canadian Shield or across the Siberian tundra. Yet, on the same polar cap, at the same latitudes and therefore in the same climates, Greenland’s soil is buried every year under the weight of an ice sheet several thousand metres thick. Why don’t the same causes produce the same effects?
This is why: long ago, during a winter, it snowed a little there, at altitude. Very little, barely above equilibrium. But the thin layer deposited in that way did not melt the following summer, cooler than usual. These long cold spells arrived; no one noticed them. The next winter, it again snowed little but enough to cover over the previous snowfall, already frozen. From the second year on, the crust so formed defied the summer thaws, weak at those high latitudes. This recommenced so that once the thickness of the ice was sufficient, no month of July could ever melt it. So, a self-perpetuating cycle started, which ended up in those gigantic glaciers, which territories that didn’t experience such beginnings, almost unobservable, were lacking. Thus Greenland is crushed under dense masses that can’t be found in Canada, its neighbour, or in Siberia, farther away. In 1952, Cailleux called this process: autocatalysis.
Some almost invisible ripple on the water, equivalent to one that doesn’t announce anything at all, announces, for its part, an emergence. After such an advent, the adventure that begins in this way adds a stratum into the enormity erected in this way, necessary, sweeping everything along with its growth. Thus, newness arrives on a butterfly’s wings.
The birth of the Earth and of a group
The Earth, every day, receives thousands of asteroids. Light dust, medium-sized granules …, notable rocks dig amphitheatres on it that are sometimes visible. Repeated five times and at intervals of hundreds of millions of years, a gigantic impact annihilated more than ninety per cent of the living species. Yet, at the beginning, one grain no doubt encountered another grain, which, by themselves, attracted a bigger third one, which, already substantial, exerted a more considerable attraction. Thus a self-perpetuating cycle, whose steady-state regime and its limit, our planet, are known to us, formed this planet by accretion, so much so that it still burns inside with these impacts. Who will lay his or her hands on the first rock?
How does an empire begin? On an area of land, termites put down clay balls, each of them depositing one randomly. It can happen that two carriers might put, here or there, two balls one on top of the other. More voluminous than its neighbours, this mass attracts other termites, who, obligingly as it were, add their ball to this spot rather than elsewhere. The growth of giant turrets ensues. With this termite fable, I once recounted the beginnings of the Roman City and the ‘causes’ of its imperial greatness (Rome, pp. 1–5).
Inclination
Even though, in The Ladies’ Delight, Zola had described its behaviour, the French language does not, alas, have the word ‘serendipity’, used in English ever since Horace Walpole cited The Three Princes of Serendip (Ceylon), whose story stages the delight of finding what one wasn’t looking for. By completely changing, one fine morning, the order of his shelves, Boucicaut in fact made the housewife get lost in the department store he founded, thus transformed into a labyrinth, so that, come in to buy a dress and a basket, she would come back out from it defeated by ten unexpected temptations and therefore overloaded with unanticipated purchases. How many times have you gotten lost in a lexicon, like a lady in Le Bon Marché, running from one chance-encountered word to another, even forgetting the one you were looking for, drawn by the double delight of ignorance and discovery?
Some given idea is often grasped in a strange context. Does this random process lead to invention? Does genius come via serendipity? Provided, of course, that one live day and night attached to the store.
Announcements
At the beginning of every play, a comic or tragic author presents a list of dramatis personae. Given millennia of farces and dramas, guess which character is cited most often: the messenger, whatever name he may carry. Not very talkative, he announces events and therefore renews the narrative’s development; he surprises, overturns actions, disrupts equilibriums and destinies by means of crises and peripeteias; he disquiets and, striking the coups de théâtre, brings about advents. The ancients revered him by the name of Hermes. I once proposed the caduceus as the hallmark of philosophy, history and the sciences. In monotheistic religions, he moves in the form of an angel. A parasite sometimes, he disrupts communications, vaccinates organisms, meta morphoses things …2
I repeat, so we will continually be astounded by it, that, from amorous encounters to glaciers, from the Roman empire to the big bang …, these beginnings concern matter, living things, history or the emotional realm, subjects or objects …, occur in myths, the sciences, religions, works of art, politics … A stone that causes one to trip or a breath of wind reorients; from the clinamen, a tiny disquietude, a world is born; from nothing, an existence ensues: this one or that one?
The principle of reason
When, in science, we pose the question how, we answer with the cause; when philosophy asks why, it is looking for a reason. Why, precisely, does something exist rather than nothing or this particular thing rather than that one? There is always a reason for it. Whether visible or hidden, its principle makes one believe that reason remains stable and that it can only be conceived to be thus. No, reason varies: from a huge quantity to zero; in size and shape; in quantity, nature and quality; in effectiveness as well, whether positive, zero or negative. The semi-nullification of reason in the preceding examples amounts to the minimum limit of these variations.
We meet with the other case, no doubt the most important one in the world: preformation presupposes that a reason can exist that would integrate the whole of causes so that the sequence of time to come will unfold it and only refer to it: a new extremely rare and limit case. Whatever Laplace’s demon and its religious twin, said creationism, may dream about it, does reason attain this paradise of preformation? The chaos of things opposes this. I dream of a God continually blowing unexpected contingency over the ever primal waters …, more expert than the old programmer: since He already thinks the unfolding of everything, what’s the use of creating? So would perfect understanding yield to this stupid repetition?
Seeking reason, our experiments and our knowledge also evaluate its subtle variations, which can go as far as its nullification. This changes the sciences, philosophy, our ideas of the real, of things and of humans. We are entering another cognitive era. This book is continually celebrating the birth, without date, of accepted contingency: this, that could have or might have not been born.
Hence, by way of the promised answer, a repetition of the examples. Why do we reach the beginning so little? With its thickness – that is all we see – the frozen ice sheet weighs on Greenland, drives it down and conceals it; Planck’s wall separates the big bang from our physics; Roman greatness suppresses its initial weakness; have I ever been able not to burn with love? The curve of a road blinds, with its angle, the direction preceding the bifurcation and discovers, when one turns around, other predecessors behind the new orientation. Amnesiac, generations, on the other hand, take their newnesses to be steady-state regimes. A consequence quickly folds itself into cause of itself. Everything begins with what is erased by what follows. Inventions dissolve the stiffness they make more flexible. Nascent life conceals the death it takes over from. Every production comes out of a death.
Does every beginning amount to a resurrection? On that spring morning, bearing vases of spices, two women, one of whom was Mary Magdalene, were tearfully hurrying to the corpse of their hope. Through the inspection hole of the half-open aperture, dazzling men, two angels in white, spoke: he doesn’t lie here. Hic non jacet. Empty tomb; no witnesses. Nothing, absence. Who will believe these old wives’ tales? Billions of humans. Now here is the stem concealed by this new branch: the spices, bands and linens … mark the ancient custom of mummification, abandoned by the narrative. The modern era commences from forgetting corpses. Every birth nihilates a death.
An extract from a poetic art: Exordium
And how are these narratives themselves born? Did writers recognize, in the practice of languages, secrets the sciences took so many decades to discover in the things themselves?
Your words, first: from what night do they rise? If you have a vocation to write or speak, learn primarily how to perfect your exordium. In its advent, the entire aim is condensed, as in a reduced model. Its flash of lightning kindles the eyes; its signal opens the ears; its impetus impels listeners along the path that will make them fall into Demades’s trap. Three coups or strikes, a lightning strike of love at first sight [coup de foudre], a coup d’état, a coup de théâtre … curtains raisers: without a brief presentation of who and what it is about, there can be no attention, no spectacle; you will not go down well. The ever so current formula of telling jokes at the beginning descends from the captatio benevolentiae the ancient rhetors recommended to Rome. Capture goodwill: captivate, enchant … immediately or never. Dead men, stand up!3
And since I am speaking Latin, this exordium, whose form entices us, comes from the verb ordior, to begin, from which weaving draws ourdir [to weave], whose original meaning, a concrete one, designates the gesture that intertwines the thread of the warp and the thread of the weft. Text or fabric: stems and branches.
The birth of subjects
Therefore a custom that was running its course becomes suspended: an incident interrupts it, a disquietude takes shape, the weft crosses the warp; so, to fulfil the expectation issuing from the break – and Ceres, what did she do? – one must indeed recount … The scene opens.
‘I was going up to the city, coming from my home, when someone, having recognized me from behind, hailed me from afar with a mocking voice. “Won’t you wait for me a moment?” Whereupon I stopped and gave him time to catch up. “Apollodorus,” he said …’ Plato, it is said, was still working on the incipit of the Symposium on his death bed. I was calmly coming from my home, lower down, as usual … There is nothing to recount: a regular line, a quasi-dead stem. Suddenly, at a shout, someone breaks everyday life: Glaucon interrupts Apollodorus’s repetitions. Everything gets underway at this fork-point. When, later, the people at the table are discoursing on love, who will remember that someone was leaving to run his errands? A good exordium interrupts an ordinary or formatted movement with a break; a discontinuity ruptures a continuity. Time passes and doesn’t pass. It begins all the time: the stem makes way for the twig. Hold high this golden bough or branch, which allows descending into the Underworld. Everyone will follow it.
An advent cre ates or recreates the subjects themselves. Two friends, for example: the one was leading a life that was so difficult he had lost all trace of the other. Oh surprise, here he is, in front of him, emerging from the wings, like a ghost come back! Everything changes.
‘Yes, since I found such a faithful friend again
My fortune is taking on a new face …
… Who would have thought that on a shore so deadly to my eyes
Pylades first would have been presented to the eyes of Orestes?’
Andromache begins with a continuity intersected by an advent that produces two subjects thrown into the action to come by a disquietude. The encounter – new – of the one causes the other – gloomy – to be reborn from a quasi death. Likewise, Iphigenia’s incipit opens before the dawn, as the king is waking up his servants… Phèdre’s incipit, in its turn, reproduces this schema, which is repeated by the more complex one of Athaliah:
‘Yes, I come into its temple to adore the Eternal;
I come, following the ancient and solemn custom,
To celebrate with you the famous day
When, on Mount Sinai, the Law was given unto us.’
I arrive: the annual rite, a little event, reproduces the big advent from which the law, long ago, came, a law given unto Moses by Yahweh. This exordium doesn’t merely designate the Temple in Jerusalem for the unity of place, the famous day for the unity of time and the celebration for the unity of action … but really creates the personages. Who is speaking? I am. To whom? To you, with you.4 Who is speaking, once again? We are, all together, pious Jews celebrating the birth of our chosenness. Who spoke in the past? For once, Yahweh Himself, to Moses. Before Moses, we hung about in Egyptian slavery and death. We were born at that time; we are being reborn this morning. Athaliah’s incipit leaves death behind it.
‘We were in study period when the head-master entered, followed by a new student not wearing the school uniform and a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and everyone rose as though surprised at his work.’
Again, the stem and its bifurcation: Flaubert sets up the formatting of the regime, sleep and work, better yet, the ironic purring of an exercise so stupid that everyone falls asleep at it; then newness bursts out, in three arrivals: entering, waking, rising.5 The emergence of subjects in the face of the subject that has arrived. But, when Emma was slowly wasting away with love, will the entry of the head-master and the suddenly straightened up indolent students be remembered? Simple events …
Good news being given a variety of forms by their incipits, the Gospels instituted a religion of advent, whose calendar only celebrates beginnings: Annunciation, Visitation, Advent, Nativity … Circumcision consecrates entry into the chosen people … Resurrection forever postpones the necessary end. Christianity celebrates the omnitude of newness. Is there a more complete figuration of it than a still virgin woman after conception and childbirth? In this ‘still virgin’, simple and profound, we recognize the artistic masterpiece, intuition, wakefulness, dawn, the act of love … No matter if the universe dates back fifteen billion years, the cosmic microwave background, present everywhere in space, virginally testifies to its beginning.
Thus the following were born in the same way: the universe, the planet, glaciers – the inert; narratives, loves, inventions, institutions – collective, cognitive or intimate; men and women – subjects … The parallel, which surprised but dismayed in the format and delighted in events, is continued in advents. Origins shoot forth the way peripeteias bifurcate; births burst forth the way encounters and circumstances do. We begin as and when we change. Contingency invades circumstances and births in every domain. This ebb of necessity characterizes our world, literally renascent. Necessity, where is your death hidden? Death, where is your necessity concealed?
Up to now, my examples of emergence have only cited past newnesses …, which nothing conceals from us. Where will such newnesses arise from now? From our productions. Technological advances are inspiring the terrors of the year 2000. Do they get away from us? Yes, most often, as we have said. Are we afraid of their destructive effects? Can we predict them? Are we risking the unforeseen? But what do we know of their advent? Let’s shed light on our own advent by means of theirs.
The birth of possibilities
Here it is. Bouquets of virtualities shoot up from the new bio- and nanotechnologies: molecules, cells, species …, humans, relations … – possibilities. Starting from elements, whether particles or genes, such technologies transform matter and its constitution, life and its genesis, the human and its genealogy, groups … Is a new reality going to be born? Another nature?
But we think that reality is immutable and single, so much does it serve as our stable reference and guarantee. We inhabit it; our actions apply to it; it lies at the foundation of our behaviour. Prejudged to be lies or utopias, every project that quits reality provokes criticism and laughter. Projected outside of reality, today’s deviation causes a newness to surge up, one so global it causes panic, in the etymological sense of totality. We only see monstrosity in it: an intolerable exit from the human and the world, a deviation with respect to nature, ethical offences, forgetting of values, a loss of the divine. So are we going to quit this real, the one that life perceives, that physics experiments on, that metaphysics founds, that morality requires …? And what if this real, necessary and single to our eyes, amounted to the most opaque of our formats? Justified or exaggerated, these panic reactions discover in us a fundamental attachment to a world from which we don’t cast off willingly. We love it like an ancient family house. However pessimistic we may claim to be, it seems, at the moment of leaving it, the best possible world.
How do you know this? What infallible father told you? Once again, wouldn’t this real, this world, this humanity amount to formatted customs? Reverse the point of view: instead of judging recent projects from the point of view of venerable philosophies, religions, anthropologies …, discover to what extent these deviations from humanity and from the world question these cultural formations and discover the contingency of their guarantees. In their way, all these formations, disquieted, ask the question: why knock together vessels to give oneself up to the fortunes of the sea when a solid ground carries our stable wisdoms?
Serene, I sometimes envision the world in which I live to be the best pos sible world. After all, I have no other but it: a body, an existence, a destinal adventure; not only do I resign myself to these conditions, but I wake up in the morning joyful about launching my life by means of this body, in this world, with others. Without any lies or dreams, I try to practice this lucid wisdom, although actively enough to seek elsewhere solutions to my feeble thought, to the defects of my organs, to the obstacles of my environment. But this lively joy doesn’t so much sing the necessary as it does the contingent: I could have not been born; this braid of wisdom and jubilation comes from a weaving of modalities.
Outside of mathematics, there is little necessity. This world could not exist or could do so differently. How would the world survive without the water that a comet, it is said, left on it. A legend relates the strange but ordinary circumstances in which my father met the woman who became my mother. The entirety of the real rolls in the sea swells of contingency. We continually vibrate towards the possible, while tied by the constraints of our impossibilities. That said, we are leaving the house built in this way.
The second nappe of the cone
Here is an old image of these newnesses. At the end of Theodicy, the goddess Pallas leads Theodorus, the High Priest, to the final story of the pyramid of worlds: at its extreme point, she reveals to him a hall so beautiful he faints from it; this is, the goddess tells him, after having wakened him, the actual world, our world, the one, the best. Below, in the lower nappe of the volume, you see other halls multiply in infinite bifurcations, possible worlds that God, at the moment of creating, did not choose.
In this sublime description, Leibniz persuades us that God eliminated them because they entailed more evil than this one. I would have loved to follow this visit and smile, at the top, at the stillborn branches where I would have lived as a sailor, a composer of music and not a writer, as delighted and unhappy in different ways … Such branches inspired Jacques the Fatalist, in which a thousand possibilities shoot up at every crossroads, in which Diderot continually deviates from the road, capering from unpredictable events to bifurcations, caressing in passing ten virtually ramified beginnings; in rereading it (always virgin), we plunge into the actual world of our sciences and technologies, keeping us in suspense, a world traversed with the fateful and newnesses …
In short, the top of the pyramid, alone real, vanishes, towards the lower floors, into a thousand aborted possible worlds. The fact that Theodorus, enraptured then in ecstasy, had only looked at the bottom of the volume, where these vanishing arrangements became blurry to his sight, without lifting his eyes towards the extreme point of the building astonishes me. Being the good geometer he is – the author uses a polyhedron, I prefer a curved volume – he nonetheless knew that a cone develops two nappes and not only one and therefore knew that at the top of the summit a second nappe begins showing, in its turn, new possible worlds, the very ones we are causing to emerge today starting from this one; our projects surge up in this conic jet … like the sideways leaps of Jacques the Fatalist. We are throwing in front of ourselves the possible worlds God abandoned below the only real one, chosen for its excellence; reversing the creative act, we are making the spectrum of the virtual shoot up into fountains that are ready to be born. From natured, we are becoming naturing, and I shall talk to you tomorrow about the plurality of worlds.6
The escence of humanity
The cone above or branch surges up from the nappe below or branching. The second nappe takes over from the first one, which is partly abandoned. We give rise to other worlds, other geneses, a new humanity. We construct sheaves of possibilities. But what is new in that? We have always quit our homes: animality too little, Africa in the past, caves formerly, antiquity not so long ago, solid ground in order to sail the mobile sea and the turbulence of the air, gathering and hunting the day before yesterday, agriculture yesterday, evolution little by little … Our species leaves. This is its destiny without definition, its end without finality, its project without goal, its voyage, no, its wandering, the escence of its hominescence. We leave and cause our productions to leave from us; we produce and we autoproduce through this ceaseless movement of leaving. We set sail. The way we left the uterus and our mothers’ wombs, the lands of our childhood, our naive beliefs, ten fleeting historical truths, our peasant language …, the way we left the programme so as to learn and the innate so as to acquire …, we are leaving today the unicity of the real, of the world and of humankind for possible other ones.
What use is leaving, again? Are we giving up a bird in the hand for a hollow two in the bush? What use is setting sail? Have we ever stopped detaching our hawsers? The Presocratics abandoned the earth for geometry: dreams! Saint Paul left antiquity for the Resurrection: fantasy! Hanno, Nearchus, Pytheas of Massalia, Vasco da Gama, Columbus, Cartier, Cook and Cousteau embarked: madness! Learning quits a prior and programmed niche, a genetic automatism, for an adventure without any clear promise: a leap into the unknown! Being moored across with two anchors in safe harbour shackles our complacencies. Stemming from bitter waters, life relaunches itself there by the wind of contingency and the risky taste for freedom. To the sailor goes the first cogito: no one counts on anyone except on oneself on the open sea. A free human, you will always love the sea.
Appareiller [setting sail], precisely: the Grand Narrative of technologies
So never have we attained a sum of possibilities as complete as today. To show this, I cannot avoid recounting the advent of technologies, millions of years ago, by a process of externalization or exo-Darwinism, which I found above (first part, pp. 50–54) regarding knowledge and invention, entering into the body and escaping from it.
Here is it: instead of hitting the head of a stake with our closed hands, we strike it with a sledgehammer imitating a forearm ending in a fist. Technology substitutes, for the extremity of the upper limb, an external man-made thing that resembles it. In a certain way, the tool leaves it, the bones becoming, by our hands, wood and iron, like an exoskeleton. Likewise, for the lower limbs, the wheel externalizes the quasi-spherical joints of the hips, the knees and the ankles; walking and running were already circulating on cycles; reinventing them as machines liberates them from the locomotive organs. Thus the breast pump falls from the breast; clothes shoot forth from flayed skin; the cap from scalped hair; the pump from the heart and the baby bottle from the feminine chest.
I have long called this leaving: appareillage [setting sai l]. The free sea, once again! Similar [pareil] to the organ it imitates, a device sets sail [un appareil appareille] in this way from the organism, extracts itself from it like a boat departing the quay, prow first, for the open sea. So, outside of our bodies, our organs go to seek their fortune in the world. Afterwards, our running or jumping records improved less fast than our exploits with the cart, become bicycles or space rockets. Flowing towards history, human evolution transformed technologies more than organisms. Hence the name I have proposed: exo-Darwinism. Sapiens and faber were born through the invention of devices whose form quit resemblance to its womb so quickly that we forgot its origin. Tools leave bodies; technologies flow from a ‘natural’ source.
The detachable artificial
A baby bottle imitates the breast the way a hammer imitates the forearm and fist; similar to the breast, it set sail from it. But, in comparison to the organ, fixed to the body by evolution, it in addition has the advantage of mobility, of availability, of having a detachable character. Non-detachable, a lion’s fur forces it to stop running when this fur causes overheating. The climatic conditions of the niche orient selection first towards organisms equipped with this or that fur, but once attached to the skin, it remains there, while waiting for other constraints and another selection. This wait can last a long time. A heavy jacket would have, on the contrary, allowed the wildcat forced to rest to continue the hunt; it would have been enough to take it off so as to potentially put it back on, at leisure, depending on the quickly changing conditions of hot and of cold. Thus Hercules put on the hide of the Nemean monster; thus, Aztec priests wore the skin of the flayed victim – in passing, let’s salute death, always present. Both of them could remove them quickly or at their leisure. A technological object wins out over the corresponding organ because it can be detached when its usefulness disappears. The baby bottle is equivalent to a detachable breast.
Inventing tools, we have replaced the functions of our organs with them; we have even often improved these functions, exchanging the fixity of the functions for the mobility of the tools, as well as, globally, evolution for history. Don’t perceive technology in the same way anymore; see it as our body in externalized pieces, independently evolving. I said earlier that we were quitting the real and humankind: said devices have been quitting our organisms ever since Homo faber emerged. Evolution produces a body that produces a new evolution.
Revisiting death
Please reckon, on the other hand, the time saved by technology in comparison to evolution, in which it would have been necessary to wait – millions of years? – for its process to equip us with organs as effective as tools. Calculate as well the corpses it has spared, mercilessly eliminated by selection if and when organisms lacked such tools. Define technology as a tremendous savings of time and deaths. Once again, an invention leaves death.
What can we do today about this original fate except to manage it carefully? What do aesthetic fashions, ideologies, recent economic or political conditions … matter in comparison to this temporal archaism, in comparison to the process of hominization, to this surging up out of the body on the part of these new branches? Technology accompanies nature, since humankind itself was born, is still born and will be born – nascor, naturus, natura – from making things; thus it was born, faber, already fabricating, with its own hands, equivalents to its organs. And thus it had already entered into autoevolution.
The egg: Half-alive and half-object
We come to a singular organ: evolution seems to have separated the oviduct of birds into the uterus and the mammary gland of certain viviparous animals in such a way that, in comparison to the two functions of the egg of oviparous animals, the embryo returns to the maternal body while the fixed stock of nourishment changes into a secretion of the breast varying with demand. This allows us to deepen the image of setting sail and to see how the hammer leaves the arm. Conductive, the oviduct in fact produces a double egg, half-object, half-alive: living certainly, carrying a developing organism, but inert, a little, since armoured with the calcium protecting what is going to be born. Through the laying of eggs, oviparous animals have already taken, for millions of years, the path of what I am calling exo-Darwinism: they externalize the ovum, a sort of exosome. Since they produce, halfway of course, but already halfway, something of the objective, did birds precociously invent what I was tempted to swell the pride of humans with? Besides the egg so reproduced, objectiveness that has already been produced, like nests and pretools …, abounds around their bodies. Has a certain technicity already ensued from oviparity? The winged intelligence of feathered creatures – the seasonal invention of melodies by chickadees and hummingbirds; the knotted interlacings and the fabrication of vices so that the beaks of woodpeckers can crush shells; the long-range guidance of migratory birds; the courtship displays in which dances, colours and music unite in sumptuous operas … – marvels that fascinate ornithologists and to which I have so far only given a behavioural interpretation through the three dimensions of flight, have new light shed on them here. More generally, do oviparous animals already produce something of the objective? The objective, not yet technology, production bordering on reproduction here.
At the beginning, the egg: the origin of almost every living being, whether oviparous or viviparous, should we in addition reckon it to be, as it were, a material origin of technologies?
Exoskeleton and keratinous appendages
Better, by externalizing the egg, a movable half-object, isn’t oviparity an advance over the exoskeleton, still attached? Were oviparous vertebrates thus continuing a vast movement on the upstream side of which arthropods, insects and other mollusks …, ammonites, oysters …, in short, invertebrates in general, were already secreting chitinous armour or, by the intermediary of the mantle, shells and carapaces, an exoskeleton in general, the way masons would build our houses via another externalization? Have we ever built constructions as exquisitely spiralling as mollusk shells, often so luxurious that we don’t know of any culture that doesn’t seize upon them to adorn their bodies or use as currency? In short, did technology begin from the Cambrian explosion, that Paleozoic Era in which hard parts appeared? Didn’t these hard parts invent the exterior of an interior, a framework and protective walls for the soft and fragile parts, as it were? I dream of this antiquity – a half billion years – for the advent of technology. Truly, without grafting history onto the Grand Narrative, how are we to resolve today’s problems in depth?
Later, with vertebrates, feathers, hair, hooves, claws and teeth, the carapaces of chelonians, the scales of the pangolin … continue this vital flow of proto-technicity … From the oldest exoskeletons, perceptible starting with the Burgess Shale, all the way up to the appearance of these recent keratinous appendages, this giant chain of intrabiological, primitive, ‘natural’, still not detachable attempts, announcing future externalization, has carried on. Do technological graveyards (polished stones, ancient ruins, junked cars …) fall into line with the fossils of the Cambrian?
From oviparity to viviparity, moving back then so as to jump better, as with some instances of neoteny, evolution reverts from the externalized egg back to the interior of the organism with regard to the uterus and the embryo, but, finally with humankind, suddenly returning to this, explodes tremendously with devices. The breast falls into baby bottles, those inert half-eggs. Half-egg: a stock that doesn’t carry an embryo; inert and not living, made of clay or glass, the way an egg is surrounded with calcium. Our production bifurcates from reproduction. By means of walls and roofs, we repeat the construction of shells or nests, in infinite number, establish networks and cities, in limitless forms … The image of setting sail transforms into a kind of laying of dead shells, peculiar to certain viviparous animals. By means of living reproduction, an entire organism resembling its progenitors is replicated ‘in flesh and blood’; by means of technological production, the performances of an organism are reproduced, almost in the sense of representation or copy, but analytically, function by function.
Not only, for fetishes and Statues reproduce the organism globally as well. Not so long ago, I dreamed that the monsters and chimeras left to us by a certain antiquity, and whose forms united humans and animals, sometimes even mixing them – the Assyrian cherub: old man, eagle and bull; the jackal-headed Egyptian Anubis; or Quetzalcoatl: the feathered Aztec serpent … – related, in a religious context, the long, difficult, never completely finished passage from the animal to the human, and therefore recounted the process of hominization. Did the civilizations that bequeathed us these fossils sculpt what we call evolution? Since said fetishes statufy its theory, we didn’t know how to read time on these arrested images. The process of hominization is deciphered there, pious.
On balance, technology gushes forth from evolution, accompanies the tree of species, appears starting from the shells of invertebrates (starting from sporangia, those vases carrying seeds?), in the reproduction of oviparous animals and certain viviparous ones, then explodes, and already in beavers. Seeming to turn their backs on nature, cultures, productive of devices, therefore don’t render us so foreign to this natural arborescence and its multiple branches … nor so divine for the enthusiasts, nor so satanic for those plunged into mourning. Evolution produces, of itself, technology, non-intentional and programmed at first, therefore making it be born naturally, and then, with us, leaves the program and enters into learning and intention.
This broad view redraws our place in the élan vital.
Heat, solids, fluids and negentropy
Up until now, I have seemed to confuse technology with the solid inert: baby bottles, statues …, bronze, wood or iron. Have I committed Bergson’s error, for whom coherence and rigidity defined the intelligence that fabricates? Fluids flow with the same movement. The fire-based machines of the Industrial Revolution transform energy thanks to liquids or gases transporting heat. Have I neglected to warm up the baby bottle that gives milk to the newborn but also the calories ‘naturally’ provided by the mother’s breast? So the entire reasoning above is maintained while including the thermodynamic newnesses already discovered by evolution with warm-blooded animals and homeotherms. Engines function like organisms … although the efficiency is not as good; we externalize the internal environment, its Carnot cycles, its exchanges in deviation from equilibrium. But, before the modern engineer, the Neolithic farmer had already sought to manage the refined mixture of heat, wet and windy necessary for Thermidor and Messidor.
Moving from ordinary energy to negentropy, we are lastly designing software that receive, emit, transmit and translate information ‘like’ tissues and the nervous system. The telephone externalizes the ear and clamours; the computer detaches itself from the head like the hammer from the fist. The recent tools follow from the same flow, running then towards the cognitive and going back towards the living. After the agricultural technologies, which farm flora and breed fauna, the nano- and biotechnologies return to reproduction, from which I have just departed with the bird oviduct.
The origin of the quasi-object
What relationship do we maintain then with these new products that, impelled by a multimillennial impetus, we cause to be born or externalize? As with the facts of knowledge, described above, we reincorporate them!
I have no carpentry or smithing experience, but I have dredged rocks from the bottoms of rivers, worked the land, piloted vessels and written books. The pitching under the legs dances as with lovemaking; armoured in its shell, does the king scallop take a similar fluctuating part in the surf? Sailors and ploughmen caress, force and penetrate riverbeds and furrows like feminine genitalia by adapting to and obeying them; seeds, words, thoughts in profusion … secreted … gush forth, quasi spermatic … for sowings. Climb to the top of a crane and experience how fast you become a wading bird planted on a long leg, watching over the construction site from the cockpit-eye, taking and leaving, with your long beak fitted onto the handle of a long neck, form panels and concrete ready to be used.
The relationship to a man-made thing quickly retransubstantiates it into a living thing. Quasi animists, we personalize it: jealous, my truck immediately breaks down as soon as it changes drivers; a car driven by several hands doesn’t last long and soon falls onto the scrapheap like a whore; I loved my boat like a violent, demanding and sweet mistress. Returning to their corporal source, tools become organs again; don’t touch my tools, the artisan insists … or my computer, the writer demands; don’t bump my head! The infant with the baby bottle sucks it and handles it like a breast, even though the bottle set sail from the maternal bosom. Anatomy is overflowing with technological terms the way the technologies were swarming with vital words in the past: a translation of this animist proximity (in its genesis as well as by practice) into language.
Lastly, just as the egg-object transits, in reproduction, between mother and child, so the baby bottle, detachable, already marks out, when someone else takes it and gives it to the newborn, familial relations. This is the origin of the quasi-object … a peace pipe that passes between hands and l ips, a ball, token, coins, words, Host …
Revisiting the origin of biotechnologies and evolution
Like these practices but with an eminent sophistication, do our biotechnologies simply reconnect with this colossally primitive, organic emergence of all technology? Do they too flow back towards their corporal source? Issuing from the organs …, welcome is their return to the fold! One must have forgotten this imitation on the part of the hammer or software … and the selection on the part of breeders to be surprised at genetic engineering to the point of suspecting it of monstrosity. The simplest machines have never bifurcated in any other way than the lever from the elbow; the winch amounts to a joint. What have we fabricated that evolution didn’t invent? Having left the living towards the technologized inert, technology finds the living to be technologizable; externalized from the cognitive, it finds artificial intelligence. Lastly, production, in the above sense, returns to reproduction, that is to say, twice towards genesis: by returning towards the origin such as I am describing it and by the decoding of genes.
Still ignorant of this second Grand Narrative, the old theory of animal-machines, the mechanism of present-day reductionists … immobilize this long duration. They reduce its process to an equivalence, even though it took billions of years for evolution to lead the inert towards the living, then some five hundred million to move from the living to technology and lastly to flow back, today, from technology towards the living and the cognitive. So in the final stage of the process or in a loop, biotechnologies return to the living sources of technicity. Conversely, evolutionary time becomes a slow and gigantic fabricative advent: it forms, contingently, bearers of shells, of fangs, of beaks, of exoskeletons …, circulations of fluids, of energy and of heat …, emitters, transmitters and transformers of information … Tempus faber precedes the Homo of the same name, who imitates it then, as though he were adopting its gesture; entering into its dance, our ten fingers already understood creative evolution.
Avatars
Issuing ourselves from the earth and from metals, from heat and from information, we work metals and the earth, then fires and fluids, lastly the little energies … like evolution. We take over responsibility for the works evolution accomplished in us and around us. First: having left the inert, the evolution of living things returns to it, archaically in the case of exoskeletons or dams, but in the final stage of the process, through our usual tools. Second: leaving the living, through externalization, our devices return to it in biotechnologies. So technology can be defined as the originary inert, reinformed by the (time of the) living, and sometimes returning, as in a loop, towards the living itself, which is then reinformed by technology. These returns contribute to showing the contingent and unpredictable character of the advance proper to evolution. Used twice, the verb ‘reinform’ expresses the importance of the role played here by information: I shall return to this.
Just as the living took up the inert again and, in reinforming it, produced carapaces and shells …, all of them exquisite artistic forms in which the interior closures, windings and chiralities proper to life can be read, so we would take up again our joints, our heat and our software information, lastly our relations, in order to externalize them, thus imitating the production and reproduction of living things, but in diversifying and generalizing them. Could we lastly, and conversely, know the inert and even the living without technological models, methods and systems? Technology mixes the inert, the living and information variably, all three of them continually returning, as in a cycle, one after the other, according to evolutionary time. The inert, the living and the technological thus become avatars, capable of being metamorphosed into each other, over the course of a colossal time, like three varieties of the same type, a type common to these states. Can it be named?
Conversely, evolution itself, which we are beginning to suspect began starting from the very first inert molecules, which were tried, abandoned, transformed … (yes, mutating and selected in a way), shapes the totality of the ways things are. So might evolution begin with the big bang? Might it pass then from the exclusive domain of the living to the span of the Grand Narrative, history and even, no doubt, knowledge included? A ‘substance’ flows in this Narrative, a substance that passes through four states, inert, living, technological, lastly immaterial, which our various metaphysics distinguished, but which duration mixes and shapes.
Numbers, codes, notes
Immaterial or abstract, the fourth state, sometimes named mind and sung of as the ultimate crowning achievement of the productions of the human understanding or of raw matter, or as the first project of a preformative God, according to this or that stubborn division, constitutes, to my eyes, although paradoxically to the eyes of many, the fund common to the inert (particles, atoms, molecules, crystal …), to the living and to the technological, the ‘substance’ common to the three other states, which are unfolded along evolution and constructed by combination and figures … All things shoot up from notes: to say what flows in the Grand Narrative, cosmologists, physicists and biochemists, recent, unite with the ancient Pythagoreans, who saw numbers everywhere. Words and things are coded as notes or numbers, information bits or pixels. Here has returned, but at the limits, the advent on dove’s feet …
The universe of fire, the rocks and the ices of planets, the air and the water, the molecules that replicate themselves, the scales of reptiles and the feathers of birds, the strange charm of women and the native simpleness of children, the sparks of forges, the planes and the computers, the marble statues and the symphonic waves …, crystals, flesh, arts and trades, fine arts, even my desire, even my prayer, even my ecstasy …, all of them are composed of the abstract: superstrings and branes, multidimensional spaces, excitations of the quantum field, the curvature of space, figures and symmetries, elements of information, pseudo-points, numbers, probabilities of presence … Radiation and matter ensue from an immaterial … Elements link together to form things and world by exchanging information.
So knowledge shoots up from what flows in the Grand Narrative. In sequences, knowledge folds itself on to the temporal chains of the world, is part of them, is extracted from them, extends them and imitates them, plays at constituting or reflecting them. Terminal, initial, arborescent, unexpected, repeated, abandoned, ramified, made up of unpredictable attempts in elementary sequences of information and of numbers, it conforms to things made of numbers and of information. Cogito: the abstract productive of the world encounters the abstract that reconstitutes me. Cogito: geometric and numerical, my bones rest on geometry and the numbers of things. Cogito: the abstract that makes me pass from my light and fragile existence, emotive, rare with intuition, dense with inexistence, to the weighty things of the world passes through the abstract that makes the world pass from nothingness to existence, passes through the abstraction, as well, that makes you pass, yourself, from absence to presence. Cogito: dense to the gills with informative sequences, I plunge them into the information sequences of things, of the world and of others.
Without adequations between these two abstractions, the one that constitutes me and the one that forms the world, no science, no knowledge, no language, whether rigorous or intuitive, nor music nor poetry, nor belief nor love … would be born. Without these adequations, mathematics would not speak universally; we would remain strangers to the world. Thinkable thanks to the immaterial operators that construct them, the community of the four states varies in the Grand Narrative. Along this narrative, traceable a parte post, the bifurcations of each state – inert, living, technological … – begin, unpredictable a parte ante.
The surprising paradox of the fact that the real is born from the formal is erased the moment one understands that the abstract stands between nothingness and existence and, moving from one to the other, forms a bridge between the two. Has it ever had any other status? Neither the concept nor the circle, nor the concept of circle, of course, exists here and now; but who can say that they don’t exist in a certain fashion? Some people even say, and I agree with them, that the circle enjoys a real existence, although not an empirical one. Mathematical entities exist powerfully in this intermediate mode between nothingness and the perceptible. Experiencing the things themselves encounters constraints that testify to their existence; other constraints, even harsher, leading to the rigor of demonstration, persuade the practitioner of the inevitable existence of these entities. This abstract mode of existence allows us, as we know, to explain the real world, the living, technology and sometimes even musical cultures and their beauty, to understand them and give an account of them. It in addition constitutes the fabric of reality of the things encountered by work, perception and behaviour. This abstraction makes them arrive to reality. Infinitely light, the formal gives birth to the real.
Today’s technological branch surges up from the sum of this real. By spelling so many alphabets, we recombine their notes at leisure. Thus several possible worlds are being born today, which is what I had promised to demonstrate.
Naturance
Described earlier, genuine knowledge transubstantiates its object; begun as incorporation, it ends, when it invents, with an externalization; another form leaves the body. This productive process imitates the living one of reproduction. The evolution of technological invention repeats it. The coupling of the three descriptions launches Homo sapiens into a continuous impetus of life, cognition and practice. Transformative, the motor of metamorphoses, it produces boys and girls, thoughts and signs, tools and machines … new … all of them launched into contingency. The world and the human, naturing, are crying out in the labour pains and joy of childbirth.