Steven Connor
Conjugations
When it first appeared in 1985, Michel Serres’s Les cinq sens had the subtitle philosophie des corps mêlées I – The Philosophy of Mingled Bodies 1. Readers assuming that this meant that the book was volume one of a series have had a very long wait for volume two. When the work was reissued in 1998, the subtitle had been removed. But this is not because Serres had thought better of his project of generating a philosophy of mixed bodies, indeed it was probably for just the opposite reason. For, as Serres himself has remarked, to constitute the complete philosophy of mixed bodies, ‘You have only to add to all my other books “volume 2,” “volume 3,” and so on’.1
This kind of serialism comes naturally to Michel Serres. Most of his writing in the 1970s, which explored the conversations and overlaps between science, literature and culture, percolated into the five volumes that make up the sequence collectively entitled Hermes, only a selection from which has appeared so far in English.2 Serres’s writing often unwinds through long sequences like this, not because of any fondness for the slowly-wrought and systematic masterwork, but because of the opportunity they offer for the unpredictable rhythm of loops, leaps, poolings, spurts and recurrences to which he is so drawn, both in his subjects and in his own writing. His manner is not that of the curriculum, the straight race run without pause or deviation, but rather that of discourse, conceived as discurrere, a running back and forth, or even, in the word on which Serres reflects in the third chapter of The Five Senses, concourse, or a running-together. Serres praises the intricate structure of the ear in Chapter 2, suggesting that its mazy constitution provides an apt model not just for the workings of sensation, but also for understanding and writing
We inherit our idea of the labyrinth from a tragic and pessimistic tradition, in which it signifies death, despair, madness. However, the maze is in fact the best model for allowing moving bodies to pass through while at the same time retracing their steps as much as possible; it gives the best odds to finite journeys with unstructured itineraries. Mazes maximize feedback. . . . Let us seek the best way of creating the most feedback loops possible on an unstructured and short itinerary. Mazes provide us with this maximization. Excellent reception, here is the best possible resonator, the beginnings of consciousness.
In reading The Five Senses, we must be prepared to enter the maze, and tolerate its toils and torsions. This may seem an unexpected way to conceive a book the title of which seems to promise a systematic division and parcelling-out of its subject. The tradition in which Serres writes in The Five Senses is one in which the senses are made intelligible primarily through the act of analysis or separation. Two things seem to be presupposed by this division. The first is quantity. It is generally agreed that there is a finite number of senses, even though there is much less sameness of report on the precise number than we might have expected. Democritus, who explained sensation by the friction of atoms of different shapes and sizes, thought that all the senses were really only variations of the one sense of touch. Aristotle distinguished only four senses, since he was anxious to correlate the senses with the four elements – vision with water, sound with air, smell with fire and touch with earth, with taste being regarded only as a ‘particular form’ or ‘modification’ of touch.3 But Aristotle also suggested the necessity for a kind of sixth, quasi-sense, the sensus communis, the function of which was to mediate between the other five senses. This metasense which, as Serres observes, was made much of by Scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages, is strongly identified in the first chapter of The Five Senses with the skin. Psychologists of sensation in the twentieth century have differentiated further senses – of heat and weight, for example – and, in this, they verify the opinion of Socrates who, in Plato’s Theaetetus, observes that, in addition to the ordinarily-recognized senses, such as sight, hearing and smelling, ‘there are others besides, a great number which have names, an infinite number which have not’.4
The second assumption embedded in the tradition of writing about the senses is that they form a hierarchy. Typically vision comes out on top, as it does (if only by a whisker) in the human body, with hearing often thought of as its sidekick or second-in-command. Thereafter, the order of merit is a matter of interesting dispute. Although Serres may seem in some respects to mime this tradition of divide-and-rank, it is in order to complicate and transform it. The Five Senses has five long chapters. The first two, ‘Veils’, a meditation on touch, skin and drapery, and ‘Boxes’, an exploration of sound and hearing, seem to conform to a one-at-a-time, seriatim syllabus and method. There is a little hiccup in the third chapter, ‘Tables’, in which it quickly becomes clear that taste and smell are to be conjoined; but then, taste and smell are so closely affiliated as often to be indissociable, so this perhaps presents no great difficulty. Chapter 4, ‘Visit’, duly turns to the remaining sense of vision, but vision construed in a very specific way, as ‘visiting’ or ‘going to see’; indeed, the real concern of the chapter seems to be with place, landscape and mapping. This leaves the final chapter, ‘Joy’, without a signature sense. The chapter begins instead with an evocation of some of the supplementary senses that are not encompassed within the traditional pentalogy: the senses of heat, effort, lightness (including Serres’ rapturous paean to the trampoline), weight and speed, all components or symptoms of the metasense of enjoyment, or heightened being in the body. This then opens on to a vision of the body transfigured in its entirety by new forms of knowledge and communication.
So, although Serres has plenty to say about each of the senses, there is much that is aslant, elliptical, episodic or to use the word to which he devotes some dense pages at the end of ‘Visit’, circumstantial, about his method of doing so. The reason for this is made clear by that original subtitle: Philosophy of Mixed Bodies. There is a tradition in the visual representation of the senses which shows the body as a circular city, with the five senses represented as five gates piercing the city wall, which provide five separate avenues of approach to the head or citadel placed in the centre. For Serres, by contrast, the senses are nothing but the mixing of the body, the principal means whereby the body mingles with the world and with itself, overflows its borders.
It is for this reason that Serres begins The Five Senses, not with the eye, but with the skin. As has often been observed, the skin can in one sense be regarded as the ground or synopsis of all the senses, since all the organs of sense are localized convolutions of it. For Serres, too, ‘the skin is a variety of our mingled senses’. But there is a more particular reason for the priority of skin and the sense of touch in Serres’s book. All the way through The Five Senses, Serres maintains a teasing, hit-and-run dialogue with the Treatise of Sensations (1754) by the eighteenth-century empiricist philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. In this work, Condillac sets out, like others before and after him, to understand the senses by splitting them up. The way in which he does this is to imagine a statue, which is possessed of a soul and all the internal organization of a man (a fully-loaded operating system, so to speak), but has never encountered any form of sensory stimulus. Condillac then imagines the introduction of input from each of the senses in turn, in order to explicate the Lockean process whereby simple sense-impressions are refined into complex, abstract ideas. The first sense to gain admission is that of smell, which Condillac thinks would be enough on its own to permit the development of memory and desire. This is followed by taste, hearing and sight, the order of the senses reflecting the growing complexity and abstractness of the statue’s ideas. But the most original and decisive part of Condillac’s analysis comes at the beginning of part two of his essay, which introduces the subject of touch. For up until this point, Condillac reasons, the statue may be able to distinguish between its sensations in more and more elaborate ways, but will have no awareness of itself as the subject of its own sensations; it will simply be the fragrance that suffuses it, the sound that ripples through it, the sight that engrosses its gaze. It is only with the coming of the sense of touch, ‘the only sense that can by itself judge of exterior objects’, that the statue will be able to grasp that there is an exterior world from which these sensations emanate and therefore that it is an ‘I’, distinct from this exterior world, and receiving those sensations.5
The sardonic references all the way through The Five Senses to various kinds of statue, automaton or robot will be Serres’s way of demurring from the approach to the senses by way of dissection and analysis, since, he says, ‘[a]bstraction divides up the sentient body, eliminates taste, smell and touch, retains only sight and hearing, intuition and understanding’. Whereas Condillac’s statue has a long and a difficult birth, such that it can only really be said to be born with the arrival, late in the epistemological day, of the sense of touch, Serres begins his book with a tactile birth (with renewed births and rebirths to follow thereafter, all the way through to the final sentence of the book), in the extraordinary, arresting narrative of his attempt to escape from a fire on board ship, blinded, choking and with only the sense of touch to save him. Serres’s claim is that the soul does not reside in one particular location in the body – the pea-sized pineal gland, according to Descartes, buried deep in the brain, but flares wherever and whenever the body touches upon itself. Thinking is reflexive because it is enacted through a kind of autotactility. The soul comes into being, not in concentration but in convergence, not in simplification but in complication, not in withdrawal but in excursion. For this reason, the soul has no fixed abode in the body, but rather comes into being in its very coming and going. Serres finds the soul above all on or in the skin, because the skin is where soul and world commingle. The skin is the mutable milieu of ‘the changing, shimmering, fleeting soul, the blazing, striated, tinted, streaked, striped, many-coloured, mottled, cloudy, star-studded, bedizened, variegated, torrential, swirling soul’.
This first chapter acquaints us with that most characteristically Serresian device, the variegated list. The listing impulse is stimulated whenever Serres evokes a complex or irregular surface, like the skin of the woman in Bonnard’s La Toilette, which is ‘mottled, striped, grainy, ocellated, dotted, nielloed, speckled, studded’. Rather than homing in on the mot juste, Serres allows the series of words for variety themselves to variegate, so that the soul, or centre of gravity of the sequence is to be found not in one particular location in it, but rather in the ramifying array or spraying out of the approximating terms themselves. The fan, as the convening of a distribution, will be one of Serres’s favourite devices throughout The Five Senses, appearing first of all in the story of the peacock’s tail, formed, according to Greek myth, when Hera drapes the skin of the many-eyed Argus on to the body of the bird that will henceforth recall his eyes in its ocelli. Just as Argus’s vision is spread across his skin, rather than being located in one punctual locality, so his skin is spread across the tail of the peacock. The fan of the peacock’s tail is itself broadcast through the rest of the book, appearing, for example, at the beginning of the chapter on taste, as the ‘ocellated fan’ of the landscape of the lower Garonne, and the ‘streaked, blended, marled, damask, watered-silk, ocellated body’ that is answeringly strewn across the tongue, both of which will later be recalled as ‘the peacock’s tail of taste or the glowing fan of aromas’ in ‘Visit’. The spreading tale of the peacock’s spread tail also encompasses the many appearances of the word ‘bouquet’ (originally ‘a little wood’), which means both a bunch of flowers and a complex perfume. Transposed into the order of odour, the peacock’s tail becomes the remarkable arpeggio that Serres performs in Chapter 3 across the array of vegetable smells, from the airiness of rose, lilac and jasmine down to the earthiness of resin, mushroom and truffle. Serres doubles the work of the senses in the way he construes them, through unfolding rather than analysis, in the many radiating repertoires of possibilities to be found throughout his text.
Preferring, and performing the logic of an itinerary that scatters or diffuses across an entire field rather than proceeding directly from one point to another, Serres propagates ideas rather than simply conjoining them. A conspicuous example is furnished by the phrase nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu – ‘there is nothing in the mind that has not first been in the senses’. The phrase, which became the motto of empiricist philosophy, seems to have no one identifiable author; it is often assumed to have been said by Aristotle, though the phrase does not appear in his work, while others assumed that it was first used by Thomas Aquinas and John Locke. The earliest use of the phrase detected so far appears to be from the thirteenth century.6 Leibniz, the subject of Serres’s first book, referring to John Locke’s Englished version – ‘[t]here appear not to be any Ideas in the Mind, before the Senses have conveyed any in’ – returned the phrase to Latin and added an important supplement – ‘Nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in sensu, excipe: nisi ipse intellectus’ – ‘nothing is in the mind that was not in the senses, except the mind itself’.7 Appropriately enough, this much-repeated phrase without an original is conjugated into many different forms throughout The Five Senses. Its first appearance is in Chapter 1 when, imagining a philosopher who might take seriously the relation between thinking and footwear, Serres wonders ‘Would he say that there is nothing in his head that has not first of all been in his feet?’ No sooner is the aphorism evoked again in Chapter 3, than it is transposed into the idiom of taste: ‘We used to read in our textbooks that our intellect knows nothing that has not first passed through the senses. What we hear, through our tongue, is that there is nothing in sapience that has not first passed through mouth and taste, through sapidity.’ Thereafter, the phrase continues to disseminate into different forms: ‘There is nothing in our intellect that does not first cross this ground.’ ‘There is nothing in the senses which does not lead to culture . . . There is nothing in the intellect that you cannot see in the world . . . There is nothing in the mind that has not first of all been set free by the senses . . . There is nothing in conversation which has not first been in this bouquet.’ Serres may even find a distant cousin of the phrase in Livy’s remark in his history of Rome that ‘neque mutari neque novum constitui, nisi aves addixissent’, ‘nothing was altered, nor any new thing begun, unless the birds assented’.8
Slowly, irresistibly, the first chapter of The Five Senses brings us to understand that the skin is not to be identified with touch alone, that touch itself is compound, so that one can never hope to arrive at the essential, unsupplemented skin as such: ‘We never live naked, in the final analysis, nor ever really clothed, never veiled or unveiled, just like the world. The law always appears at the same time as an ornamental veil. Just as phenomena do. Veils on veils, or one cast-off skin on another, impressed varieties’. This is why Serres introduces the story of the conflict between Argus, signifying the tyranny of panoptical vision, and Hermes, who defeats the vigilant Argus by lulling him to sleep with music, in a moment which Serres represents as the confluence of at least three organs of sense, skin, ear and eye: ‘Pan charms Panoptes by overwhelming his conductive flesh. Strident sound makes his eye-covered skin quiver, his muscles tremble, his tears flow, his bony frame vibrate’.
So, for Serres, the senses are not islands, or channels, that keep themselves to themselves. They do not operate on different frequencies, in different parts of the waveband, but are subject to interference – they are even interference itself. The front of the six tapestries in the 1511 series known as The Lady and the Unicorn in the Cluny Museum in Paris shows each of the senses emblematized on an oval island, floating amid a sea of small animals and flowers, but Serres reminds us of the complex ravellings to be seen on the underside of the tapestry, where ‘[t]he five or six senses are entwined and attached, above and below the fabric that they form by weaving or splicing, plaits, balls, joins, planes, loops and bindings, slip or fixed knots’. The senses are what the first chapter distinguishes as ‘discrete varieties’, fluctuating contusions or spaces of implication, ‘high-relief sites of singularity in this complex flat drawing, dense specializations, a mountain, valley or well on the plain’. They are eyes in the storm of the ‘continuous variety’ of which they form a part and from which they can never be wholly drawn apart. In the fourth chapter, they will be described as ‘exchangers’.
SOS
It is perplexing that a writer as prolific as Michel Serres, who has turned his attention to so many topics that have seemed central to the literary and cultural theory of the last thirty years – the body, language, communication, ecology, identity, space, technology – should nevertheless continue to be so little known in the English-speaking world and so hard to place in the landscape of French or Continental philosophy. No doubt the prodigious rate of Serres’s output has something to do with this, for it has been hard for translators to keep up with him – even with the long-overdue appearance of this present volume, three-quarters of Serres’s work remains untranslated into English – but then, philosophers like Derrida can scarcely be described as tongue-tied either. The variety of topics on which Serres has written must also have made him hard to pin down, though other much more well-known French philosophers have also written on many different topics – Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard. I think that the principal reason for Serres’s indigestibility by the Anglophone academic world has been that he declines the rules of engagement that govern academic theory, which seem to constitute knowledge as an agonistic space of conflict, hostility and critique. For Serres, the university is partly military and partly sacerdotal, constituted as it is both by a stifling urge to enforce conformity and by an institutionalized and institutionalizing belligerence. Serres will have no part of the academic phantasmatics of attack and counter-attack, aggression and defence, suspicion and surveillance. This fundamental aversion to the adversarial nature of academic life and writing may explain the absence of footnotes and explicit engagement with other writers in Serres’s work. The Five Senses conducts a subtle and sustained conversation with the history of attempts to understand the senses, in philosophy, science and literature, but this conversation is amicably implied rather than declared, immanent rather than outward.
And yet, for all Serres’s praise of the arts of peace elsewhere, The Five Senses is unusual, and perhaps even unique in his work, for the occasional ferocity of its antagonisms. It is surprising, for example, to find a man who has graced so many academic gatherings with his generosity and courtesy writing as aggressively of academic institutions as he does in The Five Senses. The whole of Serres’s third chapter can be regarded as an attempt to make a space for the repressed lingual arts of gustatory discernment at the table of the worldwide ‘symposium’ that he so pitilessly satirizes:
A colloquium. Its subject: The Sensible. There, a psychoanalyst only ever speaks about his own institution, a representative of the analytic school discourses on the meaning or non-meaning of discourse, the resident Marxist is careful not to step outside class struggle, each one embodies his discipline, all of the named bodies fit neatly into tombs of wood or marble on which the details of their membership are engraved. Into each of these boxes, insert a cassette pre-recorded in the discipline box. The organisers of the conference press play on the control panel and everything is underway in the best possible way in the best of all possible conferences – the different disciplines express themselves. The analysis of the contents is already ‘untied’ by the separation of the bodies, the totality or set of bodies being the equivalent of the totality or set of languages. As a result, our bodies are taken out of the equation. The sensible is expressed by colloquia or language. Socrates and his friends die as soon as they hold a colloquium on the sensible, long before the Phaedo.
The reason for Serres’s savage indignation in this book in particular is that this is no simple celebration or affirmation of the senses. Serres begins The Five Senses with the narrative of a desperate attempt to save himself from death, at the end of which he remarks ‘I understood that evening the meaning of the cry: save our souls’. And it is nothing less than the saving of the soul, precisely through the saving grace of the senses, that Serres urgently undertakes in The Five Senses. ‘What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’, Jesus asks (Mark, 8.36). But, for Serres, the loss of the soul and the loss of the world are the same thing, since what we are to call soul is nothing but the mingling of soul and world that is given in sense, in which ‘I mix with the world which mixes with me’. To save oneself, one must save the world, must save the possibility of there being an access to and return from the world: ‘I give myself to the world which returns me convalescent. I release a low moan into the world, and it gives back its immense peace’.
But from what does the soul need salvation? For Serres, the answer is, overwhelmingly, not sin, but language. Language is our great addiction, the stingy dope to which we are given over, instead of being given to the ‘donné’, the unstinting givenness of the things of the world. Language, Serres declares in his second chapter, is part of the great, almost irresistible drift of the hard (the given, the actual, the particular) into the soft (the abstract, the signified, the general). Things become signs, energy becomes information, hardware gives way to software. Serres rejects the constructionist hypothesis that there is nothing of the real that is not altered or filtered through language. Against this, Serres makes his peeled, puny, but wholly impenitent profession of faith: ‘Without being able to prove it I believe, like soothsayers and haruspices, and like scientists, that there exists a world independent of men . . . I believe, I know, I cannot demonstrate that this world exists without us’. The stubborn reluctance to abandon this native naivety is another aspect of the indigestible singularity of Serres’s work and of The Five Senses in particular. In an era characterized by a widespread consensus within academic theory that language saturates the world of things through and through, Serres stakes on the senses the possibility of a return to the world, which means an escape from ‘the abominable verb to be’, and the associated trap of linguistic identity, along with ‘the hideous, deadly passion for belonging, responsible for just about all the crimes in history’. The life of the ‘I’ given by language is huddled, pinched and parsimonious; for Serres, by contrast, ‘I only really live outside of myself; outside of myself I think, meditate, know; outside of myself I receive what is given, enduringly; I invent outside of myself. Outside of myself, I exist, as does the world. Outside of my verbose flesh, I am on the side of the world’.
Serres must set his face as flint against anything that stuns, dims or neutralizes the world of sense, or the sense of the world. This antagonism begins in the second chapter, with the attempt to make good his escape from the deafening roar of collective sound, the sound we ourselves make, that encloses us in a circle of autogenic clamour. Endlessly alive and hospitable to all kinds of association, Serres is suspicious of the social when it takes the form of obliterating noise. The topic of noise had been Serres’s concern since his books The Parasite (1980), and Genesis (1983), books which mark a transition in his work from the virtuoso explications of the ideas of individual scientists, writers or philosophers which characterized his writing during the 1970s, to more freestanding and fluidly mobile meditations. The concept of noise that is developed through these works is full of difficulty. Noise means relation, passage, variation, invention, for it arises in the spaces between fixed points and positions. But it also means excess, chaos. Noise is both the matrix of possibility and the cauldron of indifference in which true invention is ground down or swallowed up. The figure of Hermes which, as Serres remarks in The Five Senses, he chose as the ‘totem, emblem or theorem’ for his early work, oscillates between these two accents of noise. At the beginning of The Five Senses, Hermes appears as the defeater of Argus, as the ubiquity of sound overcomes and surpasses the geometry of vision: ‘Hermes works in a medium that knows no hermetic barriers. Local vision, global listening: more than just ichnography, geometral for both the subject and object, hearing practises ubiquity, the almost divine power of universal reach.’ But there is unease with this Hermetic victory, for it is also the beginning of the ascendancy of the word, of communications over things: ‘Hermes, the god of passage, becomes a musician, for sound knows no obstacle.’ As in all Serres’s writing in the 1980s, the ‘good’ Hermes of connection, crossing, communication and rapid passage is back to back with the bad Hermes of noise, racket and the garrulous clamour of the indifferently self-same: ‘Hermes has taken over the world, our technical world exists only through the all-encompassing confusion of hubbub, you will not find anything left on the earth – stone, furrow or small insect – that is not covered by the diluvian din of hullabaloo’.
The most toxic and obliterating form of this background noise is the babble of language. The horror at the dominion of language over the sensory body begins to gather in earnest during the second chapter, which centres on the image of the dying Socrates. Serres’s Socrates, famously known as ‘the gadfly of the state’, is slyly anticipated by the story in Chapter 1 of being stung by an insect:
One day I was lecturing to an audience in a marquee, as attentive to them as they were to me. Suddenly, a large hornet stung me on the inside of my thigh, a combination of surprise and exquisite pain. Nothing in my voice or intonation betrayed the accident and I finished my talk. I do not mention this particular memory in order to boast of Spartan courage, but only to indicate that the speaking body, flesh filled with language, has little difficulty in remaining focussed on speech, whatever happens. Words fill our flesh and anæsthetize it.
Serres tacitly follows Nietzsche, who is fascinated and appalled by the figure of a thinker who can carry on affirming the ascendancy of abstract science and knowledge not only in life, but even up to the point of death. Like Nietzsche, who wishes that ‘the wisest chatterer of all time . . . had remained silent . . . in the last moments of his life – perhaps he would then belong to a still higher order of minds’, Serres too is appalled that Socrates, his body numbed by the hemlock that spreads through his limbs, can carry on speaking, automaton-like – like Poe’s M. Valdemar, who is mesmerized to allow him to continue speaking in articulo mortis. 9 In the death of Socrates, the stinging words of the gadfly become their own anaesthetic.
As one of the voluble talkers assembled at the dinner party described in Plato’s Symposium – indeed, he is the only one to stay awake until dawn – the figure of Socrates provides a bridge into ‘Tables’, the third chapter of The Five Senses. It is in this chapter that Serres’s assault upon the numbing, robotic effects of language comes to its climax. When contrasted with the Last Supper, Plato’s Symposium is ‘A dinner of statues, a feast of stone’, in which only ‘dead words are passed about’. The Christian and Platonic dinners mingle with the banquet scene in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in which the dead father of Don Juan’s lover attends a feast in the form of a statue:
The Commander threatens, thunders and kills, but cannot hold his own against a drinking Don Juan. A robot with a tongue of stone, iron or wood, it speaks, cannot know thirst. We know how to build machines that talk, we do not know how to build robots that can drink or taste. A tongue can become artificial, intelligence frequently does, but sapience never does. It is in this sense that an automaton differs from homo sapiens: it has the first tongue, but not the second.
This chapter may contain some of the cruellest and bitterest denunciations to be found anywhere in the vast, joyously pacific body of Serres’s writing. Serres asserts throughout the claims of the natural body against the violent and deadening artificiality of language. But there is something numbing and monolithic about the very terms of his attack, which wields uncharacteristically rigid dichotomies to enforce its allotments of praise and blame (‘Peter, the stable rock, kills John, time.’). Serres complains that in Plato’s Symposium ‘the allegories drink allegorical wine, allegorically’, but his own explication is stiff with the same allegorizing impulse to turn things into the effigies of themselves. His argument often depends upon the hypnotizing effects of rhetorical assertion, such as the absolute, but surely egregiously false statement that ‘smell and taste differentiate, whereas language, like sight and hearing, integrates’ (even as we are also apparently to believe that language, as the tool of analysis, is destructive of the exquisitely variable compounds and confluences to which the senses are attentive). Serres’s writing here becomes singular, angular, jagged, programmatic, and nowhere more than in his sneers at those who ‘vegetate in the absence of sapience and sagacity, anæsthetized, drugged, frigid’, the ‘soft and flabby’ addicted to ‘odourless frozen food for the spongy and obese, hidden under cellophane so that no-one can touch or taste it – watch out for germs! – can only be read and heard, on helpful labels, gigantic posters and thunderous advertisements’. The eloquent, unrelenting jeremiad against language and logic takes a sinister turn in the unlovely assault on ugliness (suggested perhaps by the tradition of the notably ill-favoured Socrates) – ‘you should always be wary of ugly old men: their ugliness comes from their acts . . . Have you noticed how ugly thinking people are?’ – and the queasy assertion of the ‘secret agreement’ about beauty: ‘A culture stands out for the beauty of its women, the delicacy of its bodies, the distinction of its people’s gestures, the grace of their faces, the splendour of its landscapes and the accomplishment of some of its cities’.
Serres never elsewhere comes so close to the belligerent lockjaw he despises than in these passages of impassioned but somnambulistic anathema. We should however remember that the chapter begins with wine and is fuelled with it throughout. Perhaps Serres is deliberately giving himself no choice in this chapter but to enter and enact the murderous inebriation of rage. The end of the chapter multiplies references to various kinds of monster-haunted nightmare – the hideous sensory Gehennas of Breughel and Bosch, the riotous Temptation of Saint Anthony – and so is perhaps best seen as the book’s Walpurgisnacht, which, though clamorous with the howling of fiends and demons, nevertheless heralds the arrival of summer on the Mayday morning that dawns after it.
Paganism
Certainly, a serener mood and movement seem to be apparent in Chapter 4, which sets off with a celebration of the discontinuously local, the idiomatic, the situated, the pagan. The evocations of complex, irregular landscapes – and seascapes – recall the fluctuating skins and complex surfaces evoked in Chapter 1, though the awareness of the abstract cartographies of the monoculture set in place by language is still as strong as before. But now a new phase of Serres’s argument begins to stir. Almost in passing, in a couple of sentences that are easy to skim over, Serres abruptly suggests that our contemporary captivation by language, by the exultant and reiterated annunciation that in the beginning was the word, is at its height precisely because language is beginning to lose its authority. We are in fact ‘witnessing the last reverberation of the centuries-old shock which caused us to be born at the same time as language: we are witnessing it in its death-throes’. It is only a hint, a wink, a whisper, which it is easy for the glutted eye to glide over, and which will receive little in the way of amplification or explication until the final chapter, but it begins a decisive new phase, not just in The Five Senses, but in the work that will follow it, for, we will come to learn, language is giving way to data, to systems of information, to algorithms. Serres will make it startlingly clear in the final pages of his book that he believes that ‘language is dying, my book celebrates the death of the word’. For thousands of years, we have lived in language; but now we are beginning to take up residence in science.
Serres believes that this new dispensation may allow for a healing of the split between experience and cognition which he has decried all the way through The Five Senses. In place of the anger and asperity of Chapter 3, the final two chapters of the book look forward optimistically to a form of knowledge that will be able to integrate the local and the general, sense and understanding. ‘When the universe widens, the countryside returns. We maintain a better balance between world and place now, the particular and the general’, Serres suggests, and this encourages him at least to begin to suppose that ‘we are re-establishing an equilibrium between what our predecessors called the empirical and the abstract, the sensible and the intellectual, data and synthesis’.
This unexpected swerve in Serres’s text inaugurates the more clement, even redemptive view of the relation between body and knowledge that will be developed in much of his subsequent work. Where The Five Senses laments the split between the body and language, as the privileged bearer of thought, his Variations sur la corps (1999), will no longer see the senses as the only route to salvation. Instead of turning away from language and the specific forms of cognition it enjoins, back to the infant, infinite subtlety of the sensory body, the body will now be taken as the versatile matrix and model for all knowledge. As in the elated intimations given in the final chapter of Les cinq sens, this is a moving, active body, expressing itself in exertion, movement, gesture and dance, rather than in sensibility alone. In this later work, Serres almost seems to accuse himself of that reduction of the body to the vehicle of the senses that he regrets in Condillac. And so, in Variations du corps, the nihil in intellectu formula is shuffled into yet another form:
there is nothing in knowledge that has not first been in the whole body, which in gestural metamorphoses, mobile postures, in evolution itself, mimics its surroundings . . . vehicle, to be sure, of the five senses, but with other functions from that of channelling exterior information towards a central processing unit, the body thus retrieves a properly cognitive presence and function.10
This will open on to a series of works in which the sacramental hint given in Les cinq sens – ‘The flesh is made word, the word is made flesh’ – will be repeated and elaborated, so that, a quarter of a century after Les cinq sens, Serres will be able to represent his earlier work as a presentiment of the new body that he sees in the process of construction through knowledge: ‘Once, I wrote Les cinq sens, and, just now, the Variations, not just to celebrate this birth or advent, but to mark the changes they induced, and above all to understand a body that has recently become translucid and visible, denuded finally of the cuirass of alienation which imprisoned it in the past’.11
Whether seeking to retrieve the sensory body that is drowned out by language, as in the first half of The Five Senses, or, as in the second half, looking to the condition of the body beyond language, Serres seems, as a writer, pledged and compelled to do this work by words alone, to be caught in a performative self-contradiction of singular piquancy, and yet Serres also seeks ways, through the very forms and rhythms of his writing, to contradict this contradiction. What can be said of the senses themselves must also be said of Serres’s book, in which each chapter can be considered both as a quarantining of one particular class of sensations, and also as a weaving together of sensory impressions. Each chapter is a part of the whole and yet also holographically includes the whole in itself. Perhaps the same thing may even be said of The Five Senses as a whole, in relation to the corpus of Serres’s work.
His book repeatedly finds in its objects of attention figures for its own shape and emergence. The veils, knots, boxes, fans, bouquets and labyrinths that Serres employs to explicate the workings of the senses serve just as aptly as figures for the relation of his own writing to its subject and to itself. Thus the book builds of words its own thinking body. There is, for example, the vast, intricately-chambered sentence that comes at the end of the discussion of forms of interiority and enclosure in Chapter 2. Beginning ‘The social box, complex, constructed, hardware and software, often closed, sometimes open, constant and variable’, the sentence evokes dizzying dozens of levels of enclosure and ever smaller noise-boxes, each one both arresting and transmitting sound, all the way to the final inwardness of ‘the self-governing body-box’ and ‘the central, initially peripheral box, whose complicated labyrinth of synapses and axons organizes the reception of signals’. The very form of the sentence, with its grammatical encapsulations making out a simultaneous unfolding of and enfolding in itself, is a precise model of its subject.
As such, it seems a double of the one-to-one maps that are evoked through The Five Senses, like the map of her own skin drawn by the self-adorning woman of Chapter 1, of which Serres remarks ‘Who has not dreamed that map such as this might be drawn identical to the world itself, measure for measure, the impossible dream of an ultrafine film following all the fractal details of the landscape?’ In a similar way, the analogy between the space of the earth and the writing of texts is affirmed and reaffirmed through Chapter 4 by the rhymes between page, pagus and paysage.
He composed it pagus by pagus. Now this same Latin word, from the old agrarian language, as well as the verb pango, dictate or give us ‘page’ – the one that I am ploughing with my style in regular furrows this morning, a small plot where the writer’s existence settles, puts down its roots and becomes established, where he sings of it.
Serres represents his own writing as a geography, an earth-writing, a writing that mimics the autography of the earth, for, though the name ‘geographer’ is given to one who puts the earth into writing, ‘it would be better to call geography the writing of the earth about itself. For things – resistant, hard, sharp, elastic, loose – mark, hollow each other out and wear each other away. Our exceptional style makes use of this general property.’ This is surely the ultimate consensus of a book that teems with every kind of mixed body – the intermingling of subject and substance, of the intelligible and the sensible, of book, body and world.
Since the appearance of The Five Senses, the force and prerogative of the linguistic model have begun to wane in the Anglophone academy. One of the symptoms and vehicles of this waning has been the extraordinarily energetic revival of interest in the history, constitution and future prospects of the senses. Hitherto, readers and writers in English have not been in a position to take full account of Michel Serres’s remarkable contribution to this question. Perhaps the long delay in the appearance of The Five Senses will be propitious, and in any case Serres has never set much store by orderly chronology. Now, with the appearance of this remarkable springy, sinuous translation, readers of English will have the opportunity not only to appreciate the richness of the conversation Serres has continued to conduct with himself over three decades on the subject of the senses but also to bring the ardour and audacity of Serres’s thought into communication with our own.