1 Memory and Forgetfulness

 

The Grand Narrative1

At the end of the lane rising through the forest, positioned on a tall grassy hillock, surrounded by a torrent descending from the mountain, a farm and its annexes overlook a cirque dominated by glaciers. Beneath the morning sun and the motionless air, this view, this landscape, this scene reveal to me, in an ecstatic epiphany, the quiet presence of the things in their exact place. Transparent and wide, space here seems to swallow up time, suspended.

Descent into duration

In front of the door of the house built at the foot of alpine pastures, a little girl of three is playing; as a birthday gift yesterday, she received a cream pink doll with green pants. Behind her, the calm facade with stone lintels still shines with the ochre paint applied with a great deal of effort back when the hay harvest abounded seven years ago. Her grandfather built the metal shed to the left of the main building, itself constructed at the beginning of the last century on the ruins of an old windmill erected in the location of an ancient monastery set up long ago on the premises of a temple – whether Roman or Gallic, we have forgotten – in front of rocks moved by a thousand-year-old flood on the part of this dancing and malicious torrent whose course is dug into the Jurassic strata of the mountains enclosing the semicircular horizon beneath snows said to be eternal.

The toy comes from a store; the little girl no longer babbles and already talks; the paint job dates from recent years, with a mild climate, the new building from before the warm years when the glaciers began to recede, the windmill from the last century, the monastery from the Early Middle Ages, the old stones from before Jesus Christ, the flood from more than a thousand years ago, the mountain from the Tertiary ... As though by steps or degrees, I distinguish the fragile toy in front of the frail child leaping and running in front of the open door, the light shed in front of the heavy rocks, the house in front of the river and the river in front of the high black wall, a millionaire in years, beneath the dazzling Sun, a billionaire star.

How long has the little girl played with the doll? When did her father paint the facade? I easily remember. When did the first occupants of this place erect those stones? This requires more expertise. How long has the torrent flowed, the glacier descended from its bergschrund, the mountain risen to three thousand metres? How long has the sun shone? With datings that are now exact, knowledge answers these questions concerning my perception, then feeds and lastly reverses it: from the depths of the mountains and from the height of the sky, a temporal scale falls onto my shoulders, a scale that flows like a cascade towards me, an old man close to his death. 2

Little balconies of space-time

In a few days the doll, in torn clothes, will be missing an arm, soon pulled off; in two years the child will have to leave for school in the morning. These walls will still be standing; she will believe them to be immobile her entire life, at least lasting. Her father who coated them because he saw them wearing away has, ever since his own childhood, thought that the mountain was stable. Leaning back against rocks he believed to be unchanging, he noticed that the stones come loose with time and stabilized their rickety breaches with rubble stone extracted from the nearby mountain wall; he built with the hard immobile, drawn from a quarry dug out in width, height and depth. In front of the farm she believes to be eternal, the little girl already regrets having damaged the toy she is holding in her hand and sometimes lifts to her mouth.

Behind the child, the wall; behind the father, the mountain: each of them perceives, twice, something stable. In front of them, the little torn clothes or the denuded facade: each of them perceives, twice, something moving. So daughter and parent believe they are bustling about on a kind of balcony, on a small step of space – behind them, upstream – and of time – in front of them, downstream.

The rose and the gardener

On their narrow and respective terraces, each one, with their backs to space and looking at time, could say with Fontenelle that as far as any rose can remember, no gardener has ever been seen to die. The latter sees the former be born, open, wilt and then disappear with the passing of time, but if the flower could see or feel, it would admire the ever so slow movements of its cultivator, stable and immune to wear, in space. For the little girl, the farm doesn’t budge, and her father in his turn knows, like his entire line, that mountains are not moved. Upstream from these two lives, fast like roses, devoted to wear and decline, we find spatial stability, the house and mountain playing, let’s say, the role of the gardener; here are two levels composed, as I have risked saying, of a space and a time. Sitting on a solid riverbank, parent and child watch a river flow. In front of the immarcescible construction, the roses lose their petals; the house is erected, wears away and crumbles in front of the impeccable mountain wall, whose rock folds and erodes beneath an eternal sun: for every stance, there are as many gardener illusions.

The scale by which these generations live doesn’t exceed the traditions of their family, but a historian would date the constructions: farm, windmill, cloister, temple, ruins, traces, marks of men who have vanished. He adds a few other levels. Each of them only preserves a human memory, one that’s lacunary, sometimes written in signs, most often practical and leaving behind a few worked objects. Let’s call all our history: the gardener illusion. Like the child, we foolishly believe that civilizations and their works develop in the invariant expanse of a world that welcomes them, in short, that a geography unfolding in a local or global space conditions the duration, whether short or long, of prehistory and history, like the set of a theatre in which the action would take place. But a geologist would date this set again, for it flows as much as the torrent.

The torrent and the Grand Canyon

In front of the furious flood, sweeping away with it rocks, pebbles and sand, we also foolishly say that this current tears these alluvia away from mountains that seem to us to be stable in space; we speak of erosion, as though an active flow were wearing away a passive bedrock that was always already there, like a rare channel in a massif. No, the water flows, but the cliff flows as well since it collapses into blocks and fine sands, like water and human history, in as many and even more stages or levels. Solids flow just as much as fluids do; a bit harder, more resistant, it takes them longer. If the mountain could perceive, it would see things be born and disappear downstream fr om it and would believe, once again, itself to be leaning back – upstream, if I may, and while it folds, rises, erodes and disappears – against a space in which the sun changes as little as the gardener before his roses: as far as any volcano can remember, no star has ever been seen to age. Behind the few hundred tiers of short-schemed history unfurl millions of levels in which the entire Universe enters into time.

At the bottom of its red gorges, the Colorado flows, but the crystals gripped in the different strata of the canyon’s cliffs flow as well. From the south rim of its theatrical fault or in front of the modest farm where the child plays, you don’t see two different spectacles in a similar space but a succession of a thousand springs having diverse rhythms. Of course, one spring flows at the bottom of the channel your open eyes follow without any amazement, but the others fall more and more slowly without you directly perceiving them. I invite you to see them, not motionless but slow. Imitating Galileo, I will gladly say: ‘And yet all these red cliffs flow.’ To the historian’s and the geologist’s datings are added those of the geophysicist and the chemist, who, in discovering for example how uranium turns into lead, calculate the age of the Earth: four billion years; following them is the astrophysicist, who reckons the age of the Universe, fifteen billion since the big bang, if it ever occurred, and calculates the end of the entire process in what he calls the big crunch, the terminal catastrophe in a punctual crushing. So I can no longer contemplate sun, stars and landscapes without their time carrying my eyes and body away with its tremendous flood. Yes, knowledge feeds and reverses vision.

Just as, with their mechanical science, Copernicus and Galileo reversed our old perception of the terrestrial movements around the Sun, so, filled with wonder at this new change in duration, you now contemplate a tiered series of clocks whose wheels, some of which are tremendously slow (stars and mountains), others incredibly fast (the little girl and doll), count time, each wheel with its own rhythm or rather its own tempo, swift to the pleasure of the gaze and almost motionless to its blindness.

So open your eyes newly. You see space less than time. You see objects arranged in a familiar expanse (rivers, rocks, summits or sun) less than the different rhythms of a flowing (ephemeral works, hundred-year-old houses, thousand-year-old riverbanks, million-year-old rocks, billion-year-old stars). Whereas the common representation caused time to disappear into space, dissolved it or better still concealed it like a magician hiding a flock of doves under a white veil, whereas the theatre stage of representation made the direct vision, intuition or thought of duration difficult for Saint Augustine, Bergson as well as their successors, this series – now unfurling by making millions of springs gush forth in front of me, lightning-fast or with an infinite slowness, in front of the country house or the Grand Canyon – causes the disappearance of, dissolves or conceals, in turn, the expanse behind the surgings of so many chronic rhythms.

Mosaic, marquetry

For space, then, appears as a mosaic of time, with different rhythms and tempos. The child runs and puts her doll between the walls of the house and the sedimentary rocks; let’s translate: in a few seconds, three years slips between two centuries and ten million years. She is going to jump into her father’s arms or cling to her mother’s skirts, who examine the climate early in the morning and then, all day, work the earth, throw out the rocks and keep the soil, plough, sow and harvest with sickles, milk cows, gather eggs, hunt izard or chamois with a shotgun. Their hourly, daily, seasonal, yearly, existential … practices link together different times of the inert, age-old, of the living, domesticated or wild, and of the technological, iron and gunpowder, ancient or recent. Do they bustle about in a space? Certainly, but along the temporal ridges of their fast or slow gestures, they also link, as in a random or regular network, this composite multiplicity of rhythms that are more or less wide or fast: house, earth and rock … wheat, cows and hens … plough, pitchfork and knife … fitted together in a fractal way or mixed together and eddying, each with a different age or date. Thinking we are busying ourselves in a stable space, we mortals daily weave, weft on warp, from the ephemeral to the ancient, the slow on the lightning-fast, drawing a few fleeting lines on the billion-year-old tapestry. Space, then, appears as a marquetry of time.

Jacob’s Ladder, the submerged cathedral, Heraclitus

A liquid expanse, iridescent to my eyes, widens and slows as it plunges behind the mountains and constellations; its tempo speeds up lightning-fast when it reaches us, the house, the little girl and me. This expanse bathes the endless foldings with rhythms. Time was lost in space; now in its turn, space is being submerged in time, like the legendary cathedral beneath the ocean. 3

We find ourselves swept away by this streaming along a scale whose levels or rungs climb and descend the Universe like Jacob’s Ladder. This tremendous flood sweeps away the walls of our fragile jails of space. The alpine-pastured farm on the mountain and the Grand Canyon stream with time. Liquids flow, solids collapse. All of nature, nature being born and nature dying, enters into the streaming of the torrent. The space of the old representation collapses under the irresistible impetus of these waters.

Everything flows. We had never truly believed this initiating saying from Heraclitus. We always thought that there existed, here and there, rivers in valleys, clocks between the walls of houses, a heart and a pulse beating amid the tonic muscles and a solid skeleton. In short, the space of representation was sown with several watches. We didn’t recognize the universality of Heraclitus’ words. We accept them today. Consequently, our perception now sees time superabound. The latter drowns our perception. Always blinded, don’t believe your eyes.

This new release outside the prison of the little balcony where we and our philosophy were held stuck unexpectedly complements the Platonic exit from the old cave of space: the released prisoner formerly only added a third dimension to his perception, a dimension which would deepen the flat image he usually saw on the rear wall of the cavern. We gain, for our part, thousands, billions of levels along the universal irreversible duration. Following after the Pascalian fear before the infinite silence of cosmic expanses comes the wonder of he who floats, body and soul, on the surface in a duration with an almost infinite proliferation of rhythms and lengths that defy intuition, for the formation of things as well as in the brevity of the moment.

I imagine a living thing whose heart would beat slowly enough to perceive that mountain ridge as a giant wave whose collapsed rocks would represent the droplets of seawater streaming on its flank, and another whose rapid breath would allow it to live in a flash worlds being born and then crumbling.

Descent into the time of living things

In front of the farm and the girl, I see cows grazing, and I hear the rooster’s vainglory sing out; over the Grand Canyon birds of prey fly, and among the rocks and dry grasses rattlesnakes hiss. Everything I’m describing presupposes I’m standing in front of diverse theatres, one of them rural, the others more valuable to geologists and walkers, standing, again and always in space, in front of an adjusted expanse constituted by the stage of my sight. I am again watching representations.

But who am I, me who sees? And these living things, plants or animals, mushrooms and algae, single-celled organisms that live inside me and that I don’t see? Springs of time, streaming amid others. Mine, older than the little girl’s, is no doubt going to dry up before hers. For my part, I only count as another step of the staircase, another rung in that universal Jacob’s Ladder. Our organisms have an age, it is said; I’ve passed the time of roses, and the little girl has barely reached it; my life expectancy is equal to the porcelain doll’s; so be it.

But my brain, to only talk about that, is composed of ancient parts in the reptilian manner, of other parts as new as those developed by chimpanzees and bonobos, lastly others still, incomparably more recent. Layer by layer, it could be dated like those cliffs whose different strata sink more and more deeply into the past. Likewise, my DNA appeared, of course, with the union of my parents, who built it the way cards are shuffled, but in its own structure it is more than three billion years old; even older still, the atoms composing it and me go back to the fabrication of hydrogen and carbon by the galactic energy of the Universe.

Who am I? Not only a step of the ladder, for the age of civil status, but also the successive rungs of a good bit of its length. I spread my time over the world’s duration, or rather I plunge into the entirety of its time. Composed of varied rhythms, my body goes from the ephemeral to millions of centuries, in sum so old that my life and history itself scarcely matter.

In our behaviour and our thoughts, we could soon, we are already able to distinguish between those dating from the very formation of cells, billions of years ago, those dating from our spinal cord, hundreds of millions of years ago, those dating from others who were contemporary with hominization, and those dating from others lastly who only go back to the past century or yesterday morning. We far exceed our history. Our gestures, sensations, desires, intuitions and feelings connect, in real time, a thousand incomparable dates, the way, just now, the gestures of the tenant farmers did. As individuals as well as a community, these so vastly diverse times plunge us, up to our necks, into an oldness that’s compatible with the world’s oldness; sunk into this descent, our forehead reaches the threshold of history, barely, and our hair, the threshold of our existence. Thus our body understands this ladder since the ladder forms it; our body climbs or descends it almost in its totality since our body knows how to evaluate it. The history that begins with writing and the duration of my own life amount to a few steps among these countless rungs. Consequently, what weight do the sciences called social have when they only refer to these very thin layers? Milligrams in comparison with thousands of tonnes? Does our history do nothing but split hairs?

Lastly the cows, the rooster and the wolf, the firs and the ferns on the slopes also climb and descend this great staircase and just as much as we do. Old life, antiquated flesh.

Newborn old man

Meditating once more on my body and that of my granddaughter, when I consider the endless time needed for our tens of thousands of billions of cells to appear independently, to reproduce and become differentiated, to start living together by forming multicellular organisms with separate zones, original tissues, specific organs and different functions, fitted together like Russian dolls, when I count the rhythms they needed to abide by in order to reach a symbiosis, one that’s viable for a certain time amid the obstacles and predators, as well as the gigantic army of their immunological defence, lastly the long chain of molecules they needed to construct in order to reproduce, without too many errors, a similar organism that would be as big, I am measuring, by the brevity of its duration, the extraordinary difficulty of this combination. Conversely, the multiplicity of the obstructions it met with causes me to be amazed at the fact that this assemblage has lasted, even for a little. Suddenly summarized for each of us in nine months of gestation, a dizzying whirlwind, this contingent masterpiece required billions of years of attempts, errors and deaths as well as this gestation, fast and successful, in order to last merely a few decades and perpetuate itself by procreating. I am measuring at the same time its long strength and its short fragility. Three years or seventy: what youth, what brevity in comparison to the enormous archaism and slowness of our composition.

New and old, we are becoming experts today in this gigantic time. By making these two operators – selection and mutation – vary, we know how to exploit it in the fields or in the laboratory. Thus we imitate the nature of life, I mean the way bodies are born, by projecting our exhilaration of speed onto this billion-year-old slowness. For biotechnologies now synchronize the times of evolution, of ontogeneses and phylogeneses. Who are we? Living things, old and new, that dare at this moment to actively tie evolutionary time to the time of history. History is changing speed, like it never accelerated before, for this decisive reason.

Our history formerly left life; life is entering into history.

De senectute: The equality of living things before time

When the Ancients wrote De senectute or a vain chatterer wrote doggerel about The Art of Being a Grandfather, they were merely lamenting or singing the short time inscribed on the village registers and cadenced by the trembling of their limbs. In addition, when assessing life expectancy, ancient and recent, their tally stopped quickly: de brevitate vitæ.

Rock ptarmigan and chamois, the grass of the fields and reeds, the lengths of these existences scarcely last a blink of an eye in comparison with the length of the life, counted on molecules and atoms, whose flood traverses everyone and which, in me, shines and burns. De senectute vitæ: here then is a true oldness, common to the dying and the newborn, to little girls and grandmothers, to animals and plants, to friends, to enemies, all of them bearers of a DNA, all of them equal in time, with the exception of two parts, the one minimal, their individual age, the other much bigger, the interval lived since their species made its appearance. I’m not taking into account thought, emotions or cultures, narrow and lightning-fast.

Thus we are all aligned together along another staircase, or we are scattered along the trunk and branches of the trees the naturalists have drawn, over and over again, for several centuries and which Darwin made dynamic. This differentiated duration of course wins out over the brevity of our ages. This common crow who traverses, from left to right, the alpine farm’s platform, this alligator from the Louisianan bayou, not to mention the rare coelacanth in the oceans, precede me by a fair amount along the bifurcations of that tree in which their spring has gushed forth longer than mine. But this difference in age between the genera only ruptures this universal oldness a little, an oldness counted, I repeat, on molecules and atoms, and which makes me equally contemporary – or almost – with every living thing and, in particular, with my mammalian cousins, with Lucy and Homer, but also with my granddaughter. De senectute omnium vivorum. New as much as since always, this equality – at least a statistical one – of every living thing in relation to time is well worth a solemn declaration.

Next to this common oldness, my oldness, individual, and even that of history, form a slender margin. The differences by which we bake the bread of our daily hatreds, of our carnal contempts and of our little bits of knowledge thin down into an imperceptible duration; historical influences have little weight next to the immensely long causes that formed this or that neuron whose excitation contributes to this perception or that emotion. The conditions of cultural or individual diversity suddenly shrink into vanishing differentials. We are almost all as old as the Earth. Recent and rigorous, our time-counters bring back nature, in the sense where life was born billions of years ago. We are all immersed in the same alluvium. This natural equality is well worth a universal declaration.

Descent into the moment

What, conversely, should we say about the instant? And its brevity? Now, what am I holding in my hand? 4 The bursts of laughter of the cascade and the slaps of the breeze, little unanalysed perceptions but reducible into as many nanoseconds as centuries dragged by the immensity of the past. The womb of a pregnant woman experiences a million biochemical reactions per second; while I write this word, my organism is producing almost as many. As from a horn of plenty, the innumerable gushes forth from the instant. Celebrated by the ancient moralists and repeated by ten parrots, this moment in which I’m speaking and which flees far from me suffices for matter, for life, for thought to create bouquets of a thousand particles, to multiply as many cells or kill them by apoptosis, to conceive metaphysical systems. The instant depends on the scale: let Gargantua sneeze and millions of Lilliputian peripeteia unfold at length on the little theatre of his splutter.

We shall understand nothing about the sky, the Earth, life, lastly ourselves if we continue to refer our perceptions to the time of history, short, and to build our culture upon its brevity; likewise the present moment reveals itself to be interminable. Two changes of scale discover ‘two infinities, of greatness and of smallness’, hiding in duration.

Better, a piece of knowledge and a corresponding experience have just changed our lessons on the internal consciousness of time: our organism includes, as we now know, dozens of clocks – cardiac ones, digestive ones, neural or molecular ones – all of them disrupted by the jet lag at the end of a long flight across longitudes. How are we to think the instant and duration without referring to this internal, circulatory, existential discomfort, whose appearance indicates the organic knot where our relation to time or to the sum of durations indicated by said clocks is constructed, clocks unknown to Bergson, Husserl or Heidegger, none of whom had ever flown across the ocean? Don’t these clocks play, in time, the role held, in space, by the compass and orientation? Jet lag: wild fluctuations of the chronic compasses.

Descent into the time of sensibility

The scale changes for the inert landscape and its elements, for the living body and its components; in the same way, the dating scale changes for every sensation, I mean for every relation between the body and things. Around the farm, the meadows of the alpine pastures, during this end of spring, are bursting with scarlet, orange, pale yellow and blue; martagon lilies, asters, soldanellas, columbines, anemones, gentians, rampion bellflowers, campanulas and azaleas are detailing the colours of the spectrum amid the green grass. Contemplative for a long while before this bedazzlement, my head is constellated with pixels. Better, my body feasts on them; better than nourished, filled.

The pleasure of music carries us millions of years back, to when our ancestors hailed each other with laments, and even takes us out of our species towards titmice with complex phrases and melody-inventing hummingbirds: during those times, already, these birds transmitted or received meaning before the advent of discourse. The bouquet of colours fills us in a way that’s even more originary by going back towards billion-year-old eras, towards that Univers bactériel described so agreeably by Lynn Margulis, 5 back when the first carotenic pigments appeared, constitutive of the rhodopsin of our eyes, with the first rust- and aquamarine-coloured bacteria, violet bacteria, purple ones, yellow, orangish, drinking the light through the filter of the colours; my vision drinks its fill of these colours like they do.

And from what date do the more recent neurons come that form the processing centre for these same colours, a centre buried in a part of the brain specialists call ‘the V4 complex, known as the fusiform gyrus’, common to rhesus monkeys and to us humans? Luxuriously unfurling from red to violet, the multicoloured meadows give me carnal pleasures stemming from a duration whose length Darwin himself didn’t suspect. Dazzled to the point of dizziness by this vertical plunge, my pleasure takes me back hundreds of millions of years in the past. In comparison, the sensations he evoked only gave Marcel Proust anamneses of a recently lost time.

The senses open the body on to the world, it is said; no, they make us descend into an immemorial duration, towards long lost environments. Empiricism holds for archaic eras and vanished universes. When we place it at the initial conditions of modern science, we unknowingly evoke a chain of millions of years.

Natural and human comedy

In front of the ancestral farm, I call my granddaughter now and see her swim towards me with big arm and leg gestures as though she were going against the current. Letting myself float towards her, I recount for her, while going downstream, the Grand Narrative, whose duration I just explored upstream, flowers, rivers and glaciers, mountains, suns and marvels. Perhaps understanding that I’m recounting quickly before dying, she abandons her doll, open-mouthed. Dante, Beatrice and their faith raised The Divine Comedy, eternal, to other worlds; Balzac, Béatrix and history situated The Human Comedy, short, here, there, in the provinces and in Paris. My granddaughter, today’s knowledge and I reco unt this Natural and Universal Comedy via the ample contingency of the times. The landscape and us, mountain walls and chamois, we plunge into the Grand Narrative.

Here it is: ever since the big bang, if it ever occurred, began to construct the first atoms inert and living things are composed of; ever since the planets cooled and our Earth became a reservoir of the materials, heavier still, from which our tissues and bones are formed; ever since a strange acid molecule began, four billion years ago, to replicate itself as it was, then to change by mutating; ever since the first living things began to colonize the face of the Earth by continuously evolving, leaving behind them more extinct species than we will ever know of contemporary ones; ever since a young girl, called Lucy, started to stand up in the savannah of East Africa, promising without realizing it the explosive journeys of the coming humanity into the totality of the emerged continents, into contingent and divergent cultures and languages; ever since a few tribes from South America and the Middle East invented the cultivation of corn or wheat, not to forget the worthy patriarch who planted the grapevine or the Indian hero who brewed beer, thus domesticating for the first time living things as tiny as yeast; ever since writing was in its infancy and certain tribes began to write verse in the Greek or Italic languages … then the common trunk of the grandest narrative began to grow, before our eyes, so as to give an unexpected, real and common, chronic thickness to a humanism finally worthy of the name since precisely all the languages and cultures that came from it can participate in it, a humanism that’s single and universal since written in the encyclopedic language of all the sciences and since it can be translated into every vernacular, without particularism or imperialism.

The bouquet-shaped set of Grand Narratives

Yet we would have a narrow conception of it, even a false one, if we thought it to be linear and only directed towards us, as though we were playing the role of the goal and end of all things – might as well return to finality or an anthropomorphism – whereas it explodes and bifurcates in a thousand contingent ways like a tremendous flowering and ends up today at our present of course, here and now, in front of this old farm, in company with my granddaughter, but also at as many different existences as there are galaxies, black holes or bits of star dust in space, living things in the rain forests and oceans, men and women, cultures and languages on this planet, gladioluses, buzzing bees, charming young women … our contemporaries in the Universe.

Easy, descent only follows one path since each bifurcation leads back to a common branch or trunk. But, as difficult as the one Eurydice made in returning from the Underworld, the climb back up encounters millions of bifurcations, as in a maze; this ascent has endless trouble getting its bearings and choosing its way among all the routes in the expanding and multiplying explosive bouquet. This notable difference between the descent, single, and the countless possible ascents can be explained by the chaotic appearance of the process. Unpredictable when it advances, it becomes deterministic when one turns around. Like every narrative, this one, the greatest and most truthful of all, unfurls the contingent time of chaos.

Instructions for use

In the preceding text and the following ones, I make use of the word ‘descent’ in order to respect the double tradition of science and myth. Archaeologists, geophysicists and palaeontologists dig excavations in order to discover deep archaic strata or fossils; epic poems likewise plunge Dante, Aeneas or Ulysses underground, into the Underworld, en route to ancestral shades. All this beau monde descends to the past before climbing back up to the light, present. Natural history, biology and evolutionary theory, drawing the tree of living species, confirm this movement to the bottom of these pits: there you descend to the ancient trunk and roots or climb to the branches to come.

Alas, the image of a river and the arborescence of its tributaries, the water of which flows like time, reverses the direction of this movement: flow and alluvia descend towards the downstream, to come, and bargemen, sometimes, go back up towards the first sources. Under the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine from upstream towards the sea, from memory to hope. The tree of species goes towards its twigs, but, in its basin, the river comes from its tributaries, so that at the bifurcation angles of the same fanned-out form, the two diagrams reverse their course. Neither the land nor the plant run or flow in the direction of the water.

Language doesn’t easily handle the difficulty of this double metaphor according to which the ascent of a river and the descents along the thickness of a cliff or the height of a tree are both directed towards the past. Yes, when I write that I am descending, I am going back up time!

Nature, the newborn

The multiple forks of this giant bouquet renew our concepts. We had abandoned the term ‘nature’ for good reasons. We have to, some people say, respect or not violate it, as though it were a matter of a virgin: a prosopopoeia or allegory, a statue of Flora or Pomona bedecking our gardens, how can we seriously keep this old trumpery from myths? Might as well believe that sileni and dryads teem in the thickets, might as well hear Jupiter thunder in the lightning, might as well restore a polytheism. I shall soon say how it is returning among us today.

As soon as this personified Nature disappeared, no doubt after the Renaissance, it acquired the status of an entity. Moving from deity to concept, just as easy to critique, nature began to signify the set of essential properties of a being or a thing; in defining their nature in this way, metaphysics claimed to know their reality even before analysing their properties. Worse, this nature, inflated, became the set of existents, the world or the Universe, its general equilibrium, again recognized before all examination. Laughing at these images, phantoms, abstractions or generalities, the twentieth century prudently abandoned all use of this word.

But we had forgotten what the future participle naturus means, natura in the feminine, from the Latin verb nascor, its root: what is going to be born, what is in the very act of or about to be born, the very process of birth, of emergence or newness. Nature: the newborn.

Let’s go back over the Grand Narrative. Thousands upon thousands of bifurcations bush out, unpredictable, along its contingent course. In the vicinity of each bifurcation, an astonishing, sometimes even improbable, emergence suddenly arises: the big bang itself, if it ever existed, the baking of the material elements in the furnace of the galaxies, of the stars, of the hundred objects of the astrophysical Universe, the countless events dependent on the cooling of some planet, the bombardment of a thousand asteroids, the occurrence of water on the Earth, the ruptures of the tectonic plates, volcanism, the concatenation of an RNA, the Cambrian explosion, the five eradications of species, the disordered torrent of muta tions, our ancestors of six to seven million years ago, their first bipedal walks, fire, the exit from Africa, seafaring, wheat, the ox, the donkey, the apple and wine, the invention of courtly love by the Occitan troubadours… . When I am harvesting in passing the new directions that have a bit to do with me, a thousand other gleaners would have chosen differently.

What, consequently, are we to call nature if not an integral of the bifurcations in question? A sum of births. As a result, even human nature becomes easy to define, if not to track down, as the defined integral of the crossroads that, in the Grand Narrative, brought about the formation of sapiens sapiens. As for nature, it would be defined as the undefined integral of all known and future bifurcations in the explosive bouquet of the Grand Narrative. 6

Where do we come from? From this bouquet, from this Grand Narrative, from a subset of its branches, from a finite series of its contingent emergences. Who are we? The temporary result of this subset.

Why lament over the relative forgetfulness of short narratives scarcely four millennia in length when we have just gained one fifteen billion years in length? Why bemoan the loss of a local culture when the new one extends to the community of men and when we are connecting the old and singular humanities to a humanism finally close to its universal meaning?

The religious ghost: The holy and the sacred

Regarding humanism, this book on the philosophy of nature deals with it, life and man, three concepts without definitions, and talks about them without ideology, taboo or sacred since it defines them according to the lines of the Grand Narrative.

Conversely, the fears diffused today around chemistry and biotechnologies, for example, bring back the old abandoned figures of ‘Nature’, ‘Life’ and ‘Man’, the less defined and the more sacred the more these fears grow. Let’s not tamper with ‘Man’, these fears say, nor violate ‘Life’ or ‘Nature’, the myths of which reappear like ghosts. 7 Yet the sciences laugh at ghosts and merrily transgress taboos and the sacred. This new distrust of the sciences comes of course from internal abuses, from economic and financial scandals concerning them from afar or even from anear, but above all from a completely different source, one difficult to discover and which I am readily calling the contemporary displacement of the religious.

Semi-mechanically, the collective fabricates gods, Bergson said. Anthropology teaches that the archaic religions, polytheistic, invented and shaped them in the past by means of violence and sacrifice, human ones in particular. The mechanism of apotheosis, for example, consists in deifying a dead emperor: the gods are born of cadavers and murders. Modern religions, monotheistic, are distinguished from the preceding ones by their commandment to stop human sacrifice.

Yet slaughters of this type today dominate our society, which shows murders and cadavers at every hour of the day before millions of television viewers. We go around saying that our media show violence; no, violence forms the substance of media images and messages. Without the flame of fear and pity, they wouldn’t attract anyone. These spectacles repeat, with a stunning precision, the rites of archaic religions all the more easily because modern religions are declining and losing their audience all the more for condemning these sacrifices. Of course, these religions had promoted and generalized mediation, in particular Christianity, but when in turn our civil societies invented machines and institutions effective at this mediation, said media grabbed hold of the religious but in returning further back, to sacrificial archaism. Consequently, literally converted by this violence that produces gods, myths and taboos, our societies attack everything that destroys the statues said societies sculpt.

Are we aware that we live in a polytheistic era and that a sacred terror similar to that of archaic religions is invading our collectives, admittedly advanced as far as science, technology and reason go but thus returning to backward times? In the past and up till recently, the dominant religion, monotheistic, found itself involved in antiscience battles because it had kept a few bits of ancient trumpery from this sacrificial violence, a violence now diffused in a society in which the media, playing the mediating role that fell in the past to the churches, engender statues and civil taboos. Displaced, the religious is no longer to be found in the expected places, in the denominations and temples, rather, gushing forth from the media, it floods civil society, plagued daily by the showing of violence and murder, human ones in particular. Regressive and archaic, this particular religious, pagan and polytheistic, producing little gods and causing taboos to return, reinvents a Nature similar to the old statues of Flora or Pomona. Consequently, we adore them.

Yes, the religious changes camps: the grand priests celebrate their rites on the TV set, in front of which we bow several times a day to receive over our heads, bathed with pixels, our daily anointment of violence and the sacred. Intoxicated with cadavers, society, anxious, howls for the protection of its new gods, old concepts not defined or mastered by anyone: Nature, Life and Man, statues, refabricated ghosts – the very ones science always transgressed when it observed the stars, formerly divine, dissected bodies, once untouchable, or studied our genitalia and brains, formerly forbidden. Science and philosophy still transgress, let’s hope, taboos.

The archaic religious returns into the civil. Let’s learn to recognize as priests in changed garb those we revere and who are always right because they are in possession of symbols and dogmas, while alone asking questions. Conversely, the modern religious, now in the minority and persecuted, detached from society, teaches to distinguish between holiness, non-violent, and the sacred, which retains violence, freezes it and sculpts statues with it. Capable today as in the past of criticizing the society of the deadly spectacle and the taboos it engenders, this modern religious encounters, perhaps without yet knowing it, the sciences and reason.

I kneel humbly before holiness but enter the dark and archaic temples of the sacred on horseback so as to overturn the idols: on horseback, boldly, I mean with science and its Grand Narrative.

The laws of the narrative: Descent of dead leaves

Not only is it a matter of the grandest narrative ever recounted, and moreover probably true since it is continuously rectified by the reverses and advances of research, but it’s also a question of a narration respecting the laws of every narration, rules I had formerly brought to light in my analysis of Jules Verne’s The Survivors of the Chancellor (Jouvences sur Jules Verne, Éditions de Minuit, 1977, pp. 105–26).

This novel relates the terrible fortunes at sea of a vessel by this name, sailing from Charleston, the survivors of which, dying of thirst, ended up recognizing the mouth of the Amazon and lastly drank the river’s fresh water. The narrative develops from equilibrium to equilibrium, the passage from one hardly inclined stage to the next one occurring by successive catastrophes – storm, fire, running aground – in which these stabilities totter, each of which, original, develops its own law; each rupture or disturbing circumstance allows the law to be changed.

This is how a dead leaf glides a long time in the autumn after apoptosis, first falling almost horizontally, then abruptly stalling, falling quickly so as to suddenly find itself lower, once again almost horizontal and stable, before a new stall occurs… . The Survivors of the Chancellor’s simplicity comes from the fact that these stabilities are defined there in terms of masses, forces, movements and energies, all perfectly mastered by statics, dynamics, thermodynamics, the theory of tides, astronomy or climatology, disciplines directly interested in equilibria and movements; we don’t need to have recourse to any metaphor to discover balances there: they are drawn there as on a blackboard as well as in the universal Grand Narrative, which is likewise accompanied by the sciences.

From dramatic turn of events to new development, this descent goes from suspense to suspense, in the literal sense, as though it was holding back its falling as much as possible, as though it was, counter to heavy bodies, following a kind of slighter gradient. The narrative’s action obeys a ‘principle’ of maximal action, reversing the one discovered by Maupertuis, called the principle of ‘least action’. With each interruption or stall, with each change of level, a new science is entered, which defines a different type of equilibrium, in The Survivors of the Chancellor as well as in the Grand Narrative. With each rupture a bifurcation emerges.

Is it a question here of the general organization of every successful narration? Tension, calm, dramatic turn of events, tension, calm, dramatic turn … reduce here to simple laws of mechanics. Few narratives deviate from this sequence of punctuated equilibria or, if they do, boredom and displeasure will arise; no one will continue to read; everyone, blind and deaf, will leave the show. All the art of recounting, all the enchantment it brings is held in the distribution and succession of the ruptures and plateaus, in the length or brevity of the latter, in the surprise provoked by the improbability, with and without miracle, of the former. A good storyteller follows a line and then abruptly bifurcates; if, after autumn, the leaf doesn’t fall too quickly, it maintains the suspense, but not too slowly either, at the risk of boredom. To return to the Grand Narrative, you can see quite well that that was all I was talking about, under cover of fortunes at sea.

On the enchantment of the world

I invite into astrophysics or biochemistry anyone who proclaims that the sciences disenchant the world; the sky and the living will quickly appear to him to be filled with astonishing miracles. I chant rather the destiny that put me in the proximity of scientists, whose subtle music delights me every morning and astonishes me. Even the prime numbers, the simplest of all possible knowledge, stream with diamonds and sapphires that would be the envy of the Golconda region.

But, in addition to this minute and precious detail, such as the refined size of a simple cell or the medley of colourful stars, the flight of hummingbirds or galactic collisions, we are enchanted as well and above all by the whole of this narrative, endless and keeping us on the edge of our seats, artistically carried out through a refined composition of stallings and plateaus of equilibrium, of suspenses and ruptures, of roads and bifurcations, which leads from the big bang or its quantum equivalent to the appearance of humankind millions of years ago in the African savannah, with zero finality. Long plateaus of development broken by incomparable dramatic turns of events. Like every wonderfully well-constructed narrative, it seems coherent and directed towards some end or other when reread from downstream to upstream but goes from unpredictable circumstances to unforeseen contingencies when the direction of time is followed.

On the specialty of the possible author

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, whose torches also threw light on the stability of the world, asked the question of what artisan had assembled such a regular machine; in those days God was regarded as the architect of the Universe; he worked with his hands on a definitive masterpiece. As order or as movements cadencing a stability, the cosmos was considered to be the model for all construction. From the author’s specialty, you could infer the architectonic nature of the work and thereby that of the sciences that explained it: so the Encyclopedia surrounded this palace; each discipline grasped one of its profiles in order to draw a plan or an elevation. Clear and perfect, this vision excluded plunging the palace into a time that would have incessantly transformed it, into contingency and evolution, even more so into chaotic or random processes.

Supposing today we asked similar questions, we would ask instead what novelist, what writer of short stories, what dramatist wrote such a singular storyline or narrative. The God made Word develops stories so grandiose and cleverly carried out that we might call Him, should we dare, the Grand Recounter: yes, the Enchanter. In reconstructing this narrative, thread by thread, piece by piece, act by scene, the sciences keep the world and its inhabitants on tenterhooks through their suspense. Et enarrem universa mirabilia tua: I will recount the universality of your wonders.

The singular example of evolution

For example, the evolution of living things fascinates us and, for some, replaces religion because it follows the regime of a narrative exactly. Why didn’t biologists laugh at the announcement of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, an expression that’s so close to ‘suspense interrupted with ruptures’? Probably because they were unaware that Gould, who probably didn’t realize it either, was summarizing without changing one iota the simplest rules of narrative, which this author moreover practices marvellously; oh, paradox, he criticizes a number of his predecessors by saying that they were only engaged, along cyclic or straight times, in narratives; this argument applies to his own theory. Like Don Quixote or the Odyssey, like an infinity of short stories and novels, of plays and scripts, The Survivors of the Chancellor, as I just said, follows the law of punctuated equilibrium. Likewise, Lamarck, Darwin and better still Gould discover that life is recounted. And those who followed repeat this over and over again while perfecting the methods of narration. Oh, enchanting surprise, natural history makes science and literature meet. Conversely, the laws of narrative resemble the laws of life.

Better: every one of them a tributary of the Grand Narrative, the sciences, enteri ng together into literature, find in the humanities their bed and their house. Good stories set our hearts racing as though we were watching Aphrodite herself rise, living, erect and naked, in the ruffles of the waves, of the prebiotic soup. Man and woman are born of nature.

Chronopedia

In coining the term ‘encyclopedia’, Rabelais drew a circle of knowledge, education and instruction. In those days, this complete and cyclic drawing of all possible points of view on the world could best express this architectural masterwork. So, complete science covered the world, the way the map drawn by Mercator during that same time did by projecting the continents and seas onto a cylinder enveloping the globe. As is evident, there are only cycles in these drawings. Therefore if the world shows a circular form so does knowledge, and the book leafed through as well. The Universe has a centre, the Earth or Sun, the way power or command has a king and creation and knowledge a God. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hegel still defined an encyclopedia as a circle of circles.

We now laugh at revolutions that changed centre so often and which we called decentrings. Whether it’s a question of the Earth or the Sun, of the subject or the object, of the self or the non-self, these distinctions are of no matter since they all and always presupposed a centre, whatever position may be assigned to it, whatever name may be given to it and whatever movement it may command; so, the encyclopedia hardly changes since its global form is preserved and preserves its rest. The word ‘revolution’ itself presupposes it.

We don’t live in the same spaces or the same times. At least, neither the world nor we nor any living thing are the same age any longer; we wake to find ourselves suddenly fantastically old. No space has a centre any longer, and every moment of origin or bifurcation poses formidable problems. Knowledge-wise, there is no longer any encyclopedia, but a Grand Narrative.

In what expanse does this Grand Narrative unfold? In a landscape. Today the sciences describe and attempt to patch together the pieces of these landscapes, somewhat like the way the social sciences despair of stitching cultures to each other. The most advanced theories in fact strive to stitch together: the theory of superstrings for example brings together the two pieces that are quantum physics and relativity, still scattered apart. We conceive as little order in the multicoloured unfurling of the Universe and its thousand circumstances as we see in the least cell with thousands of varied proteins or on the simple map of the Earth, sea and continents sewn together by the edges of deep plates. The order and roundness of a world seem to us today to be as simplistic as time reduced to a line. The encyclopedia’s round space has had its day, like the dinosaurs.

In this landscape, we read a chronopedia.

Time and modes

Unity or universality therefore doesn’t come back from the side of space, decidedly landscaped, but from the side of time, provided that it not be reduced to a line or its measurement, nor above all to what Westerners name history. Paradoxically, once again, universality comes back by what we name literature. Knowledge, as I have said, is recounted. It travels, like the Universe, life and thought. The old term ‘pedagogy’ told of the journey of children led by their private tutor. I hope that it henceforth expresses this travelling, fast or slow, on the part of the world, the things and the living creatures in time, yes, this new perception of the Universe, our perception and that of our children. For this rainbow-hued set of landscapes of all types, scales, forms and colours ensues from a story, the tale of this universal chronopedia. This jigsaw puzzle spurts out like a jet. Like a good theatre play or a successful novel, the Grand Narrative begins just anywhere, just anytime, strictly contingently, although it carries the succession of events in its sides, albeit chaotically. Each of its bifurcations arises like a dramatic turn of events, possible certainly, but in the very vicinity of the impossible, like a kind of miracle, like a very low probability event. The Narrative doesn’t unfold but rather jumps from the unforeseeable or the impossible to predict to the necessary when it moves from the perspective of the future towards the completed past while traversing the possibilities of the present. It thus carries the contingents on its shoulders.

The metaphysics of the ancient world as well as the methods of its deconstruction follow a two-valued logic, being and nothingness, false and true, good and evil, and love contradiction. They ignore noise, multicoloured singularities, a thousand composite profiles, the landscapes to be sewn together, the unpredictability of the processual. World, life, existence, history and knowledge fluctuate among the four categories of modality: compatible with necessary laws, all things and lives run across the filter of the possible and impossibility towards contingency.

Man, the co-author of the Grand Narrative

The Narrative resumes. All the more literary because we live on tenterhooks to know what follows since it concerns our lives as well as those of others and the world. Not only on tenterhooks as spectators but active and actors.

For ever since we created world-objects, we have climbed on to the stage, participated in the work of the director and launched ourselves into the text, co-authors of the Grand Narrative. We don’t merely work on the development of the story of history, an evident tautology since we go about our business, but rather exploit time, the fate of the world and that of living things; we intervene in the fundamental conditions of matter and life, the universal responsible parties for this new work. In the Grand Narrative, we henceforth take the floor conjointly with things.

Descent into forgetfulness

When, last December, in a Museum of Natural History, I asked the attendant of the skeleton hall the age of a giant saurian, he replied:

‘One hundred twenty million years and eleven months.’ ‘How do you calculate such an exact date?’ I asked. ‘Simply,’ he said. ‘The museum hired me the middle of last winter; at that time, the pedestal read “one hundred twenty million”. Count it up; it comes out right’.

Do we date humans to be from six to nine million years plus eleven weeks? Don’t laugh, for that’s how history and the social sciences talk, disciplines which obliterate with their few seconds the entire preceding year, as we are going to calculate the situation. What skeletons are caught in this dark closet? How are we to plunge human time into the time of living creatures and of things, my granddaughter and her parents’ house into the torrent, the mountain and the Sun, my age into the age of my reptilian brain or of DNA? How are we to awaken these dormant memories?

A thousand disciplines, a single discovery: Chronometry

The new things the exact sciences invented along the twentieth century proliferated so much and in so many domains that we get lost in this bushiness. But one single discovery, with recent precision, unites the different efforts of all the disciplines together: for each one of them developed dating methods such that the question of the age of all the objects they deal with unifies the entire old encyclopedia into a common project. What then did the exact sciences invent during the past century? They dated the Universe and atoms, the Earth and life, all the species, humankind, microbes … things in general. At a time when the common voice was celebrating the complexity of scientific results and approaches, a global vision come from a common computus, quite to the contrary, was arising. So the word ‘chronopedia’ designates, as I just said, the temporal Grand Narrative, which has been unitarily set up for several decades on the basis of these clocks, and which, with its main trunk, traverses the entire basin of the sciences, their floods, derivations and turbulences. Contemporary science restores the Chronos of antiquity to his first throne. In thus contemplating the new arborescence in a river basin resembling the Universe, who could resist the temptation to repeat the ancient gesture of classifying the disciplines, here according to the age of their objects?

To the old philosophy question, ‘where do we come from?’ today a single theme replies, one varied by the disciplines whose knowledge has recently been coupled with memory. How are we to define this latter? In an elementary way, as an information conservatory, a box or bank.

Triple descent

A first memory 8 recalls childhood and first loves that didn’t always last; lodged in a part of the brain and body, it concerns existence, consciousness and those it lives with, what some call psychology, to which others assume an additional substratum, dark with forgetfulness. Joined to it, secondly, is group memory, scattered across objective media: ruins, skeletons, images, tools, hearsay, customs, books, archives, the internet, whose information lets me participate in social life, in human history or even in its hominization; this memory is dependent on my culture. The first treasury, personal and subjective, goes back a few decades; the second one, more collective, goes back centuries and millennia, Balzac, Gilgamesh, Lascaux, Lucy.

Third memory: the genes of my DNA bring together, in part, the genes of my two parents, of their gods and so on, until all of them, plus my own, form the treasury common to all of humanity. In it, I discover what brings me closer to the Fuegians and the Australian Aborigines as well as my proximity to the Wolofs and the Bantus; better, being common to every living thing, I measure in it my distance to marsupials, reptiles and other insects, ferns and bacteria. This genotypic memory, profound in a different way from my own or that of the collectives and their cultures, plunges into evolution and its billions of years.

Their duration

Let’s count the relative times of these three conservatories taking a year as our reference: when I remember my passing romances, my first memory, which has lasted a few decades, plunges into a thin layer of a millisecond; when I learn the Odyssey, when I admire the cave paintings of Lascaux, the second memory, which has lasted for a few millennia, explores four seconds; when my eyes, formed by evolution, see light, when my skin regulates my autonomy, when hydrogen and carbon atoms assemble in the proteins of my cells, the third one, a billion years old, extends over the rest of the year. This last one ensures anatomy’s matter and physiology’s functions; the second one awakens to the world and the surrounding cultures; the first one constructs what we agree to call consciousness. In the study of the processes that animate us, do we forget this division of time and therefore the relative weights of the constraints we are subject to? Our individual existence and cultural histories weigh no more than a snowflake compared to the tons of this Grand Narrative.

In barking, grazing, spinning their webs, knotting their nests or mating, living things remember the last of these conservatories rigorously; their gestures flawlessly execute its dictates. Contrary to these genetic automatons, hominization made us into monsters of forgetfulness. Our narcissistic genius privileges, in filtering them by means of a net full of holes, the several milligrams of recent influence and plunges into the dark the quasi-totality of the year that has just gone by, before the events that only concerned me or us, the most amnesiac of living things. When we devote ourselves to history, we omit the quasi-totality of time; we remember much less than eleven months.

Not only do we forget where we just put our keys, something which sometimes allows us to invent new ones, not only do we forget the crimes of our parents and those of our neighbours, quite fortunately for morality and pardon, but we don’t even remember we have a body that’s as old as the rocks of the world. We pride ourselves on a few cognitive performances, attributing them to the genius of some Newton or of our cultural clan, without noticing that we often know and almost always move by means of million-year-old neurons, invariant before prehistory and my birthday. Noisy, chatty, fast, cheating, my consciousness conceals history, and this latter, more lying and raucous still, hides the honest and silent evolution whose slowness rises up over endlessly prepared inert soups. Amnesiac, all of them, consciousness, language and the pride in their performances silence the body and its age, the Universe and its ancientness. We dream of a historical or familial determinism without taking into account the vast archaism of the flesh and the Earth. We forget the body, life and the things.

Forgetting nature

Did this amnesia make us blind to the world? Hominization makes us forgetful; did this very forgetfulness hominize us? We became so historical, cultural and then personal that we obliterated with diverse codes the gigantic duration preceding these group and individual memories, which are narrow, not very reliable, thundering. We keep our nature, which obeys and remains silent, on a leash. From time to time it barks and growls, but language, technology and knowledge flog it, bring it into subjection, calm it down. Not always. Just as a written advertising poster erases the landscape’s muteness, a meaningful word annihilates millions of carnal years. Just as tribes possessing writing crush tribes only knowing the oral, cultures ceaselessly blunt nature. They even lead us to disobey it. Most living things listen to the programme to the point of executing only it; some, related to us, obey it a bit less; we behave as though we had lost it. Hence the self-perpetuating cycle: the more we disobey nature, the more cultures are invented; and the more these latter develop, the more we forget nature. Does our despecialization, about which I shall soon speak, come from this fundamental forgetfulness?

A culture had to contingently invent what we call science, which, in turn, disobeys culture, forgets it, critiques it, contradicts and overth rows it, for this science to suddenly take up again with nature itself, to depart in search of its lost time-counters and end up deciphering its ancientness. As though nature played the role of a kind of unknown for cultures and as though these latter had to be quiet in order to finally let its escient speak, understand by this word – all the more precious because little used – the best of its knowledge. 9 Cultures plug up the natural slow duration in order to favour the emergence of other, faster, openings of time. Cultures derive from nature so as to derive nature. Even later still, conditioned by a culture to which it is in addition opposed, science thwarts this mechanism. Knowledge rediscovers billions of years behind our memories riddled with holes; knowing is this memory.

Oral, written

The aforementioned science dates by seeking traces in the conservatories where information is kept. At the oral stage, memory, still fairly faithful, isn’t separated from the phenotypic or individual body; our brain has mnemonic zones; gestures, movements and postures are inscribed in schemas whose dynamism we retain. Verbal repetitions en famille and in public form another type of accumulation; festivals, dances, songs and stories, skirt pleats and escutcheon colour periodically revivify collective traditions; anniversaries and jubilees return so that in commemorating we remember.

It had been wanted, arbitrarily, to make history be born with writing. So the historian’s work goes, next, from reading manuscripts or parchments, new conservatories, to libraries, whose collections keep written marks on books, then from there to the excavation sites where stones sometimes bear inscriptions and where other ones remain silent. Memory, already, leaves the body and becomes externalized. Forgetfulness, I repeat, puts holes in all these accumulations: amnesia lightens and rectifies our past (what would become of us, individuals and group, if we remembered everything?); library fires tore our antiquity to shreds; a few armed barbarians left, here or there, ruins that have to be deciphered again after the passage of the Huns or our scientific bombardments. History as acts – wars or fires – destroys what history tries to reconstruct as texts; we undo with one hand what we weave with the other.

The memory of living things, universal and long

More powerful in a different way and more durable, the third memory therefore produced our body; this latter, more or less, unfolds its genome. In every living thing, ourselves included, genes function as the memory of the species and more generally as the memory of the living thing. Unlike our memory, about which we complain, it rarely misfires; when it does make a mistake, we call that a mutation, either lethal or favourable, and in the latter case, sometimes selected. Like a paramecium, a bellflower, an octopus, we bear inside ourselves, in the form of DNA, this passive accumulation of life and of our species – for which the individual acts as intermediary – and which itself has, in addition, enough energy to decipher its codes and invest this treasure in a structure that’s visible and moving in space.

From one memory to the other, we go from individual and singular existence or from different local cultures and sometimes their history to the universal, not merely of the species or the genus, but of all known, unknown and possible kingdoms. In the first case, we have more memory or less; in the second one, we live as memories. Discovered during the last half-century, the universality of the genetic code unites humans to each other and all the way down to the most elementary bacteria: every living thing bears inside itself the trace of the birth of life more than three billion years ago. So we remember unimaginable ages.

Memory’s misfires

The meeting of two DNAs of the same species, male and female, activates with its energy the passive accumulation of information. This is how the memory remembers: the genome functions as the memory of every living thing and of the particular species, which remembers in the individuals. This remembering, likewise, rarely fails, barring sterility, miscarriages and abortions, which must again pass into the profits and losses of natural selection.

Thus no one has ever seen a cow in the fields get up on two legs, dance or sing in any other way than by lowing, in short, behave in any other way than as a cow: no one has a better memory than an animal, than a plant, than an alga; there is nothing more faithful than a living thing. It remembers so perfectly that we sometimes describe it as a genetic automaton. Mutation and selection, the two Darwinian operators, can be defined as exceptional misfires of this perfect memory. Our neurons have short memories; our writings have brief and lacunary ones; DNA remembers longer. The living species are memory sites; humans leave these sites.

The fourth memory: Cold strata

Yet, the discovery of inert treasuries preceded the discovery of genes, recent, by several centuries. Here, it was also necessary to find deposits or accumulations, open them and decode their secrets. Cliffs and cuttings let, beneath the face of the earth, the first mnemonic banks be seen, sometimes in the open air; naturalists discovered fossils. This descent began in the Middle Ages with Albertus Magnus and continued in the works of Agricola, Palissy and Leonardo da Vinci. In The Mountain, Michelet, who knew to supplement his historical work with four books of natural history, an extremely rare feat in Western culture, calls beds and strata, of different colours and formations, pages; the mountain walls forming their compilations, books; and the high sierras, libraries. With this image, he crossed the ford separating human history from the objective Earth and life sciences, but in so doing he still imported one riverbank to the other; like Newton, like the archbishop of Canterbury, who calculated the age of the Earth by the generations reckoned in the Bible, like the attendant in the Museum of Natural History, he thought the Earth lived at the rhythm of language: we read in a book that the world heaps up pages in piles, like a book.

My childhood was likewise enchanted, in Jules Verne, by Captain Nemo’s dive into the classification of fish, which the author, who had never sailed beneath the sea, copied out from some ichthyology manual; in the same way a young Danish speleologist departed, with his uncle, from the bottom of an Icelandic volcano for the centre of the Earth before coming out again, like a bomb, at Stromboli; along the way, beneath the torches’ trembling light, they listed off the succession of geological strata, no doubt copied out from Lyell and Boucher de Perthes.

What do these adventurers see along this anamnesis shown to them by this new facilis descensus Averni, this easy dive into the underworld of Avernus, underground?

Dialogue of the dead, silence of the walls

Entering into the abyss, Ulysses, Plato in the Phaedo, Aeneas or the chatterboxes Lucian stages in the Dialogues of the Dead rush down the backworlds in search of memories and vengeance; they still consider these places to be human memories. Leibniz, a manager of the Harz silver mines and the first author of a Protogaea, the geologists of the Enlightenment and those of the beginning of the nineteenth century open the tombs of terrestrial memory – fossils come out of graves 10 – in which lost ages are buried. An astonishing discovery awaits them: that we had a short memory, that we didn’t grasp time’s length because we considered the Earth to be the receptacle of recent funerals, whereas it keeps the bones of multimillion-year-old ancestors and, before them, the remains of eras without any humans and even without any living things. We thought we were the only ones to practise funeral rites, whereas the Earth itself buries its own elements.

Holding forth on swallowed-up Atlantis, the Egyptian priests who kept the temples of Sais, despite their boasting in the Timaeus, only went back to recent ages; neither Homer nor Virgil nor Lucian ventured deep enough or far enough. Underground, they still remain in spoken or written history, in language. Even Lidenbrock and his nephew, always preceded by Arne Saknussemm and his inscriptions, find at the bottom of the chasm, in Jules Verne who cites Virgil, a human ancestor, grazing a herd of monstrous saurians, immanior ipse. None of them descend more than two or three steps of a staircase with thousands of flights. The presence of men obstructs the presence of the world. As soon as these sounders of the abyss encounter familiar shades, they stop and talk. They always talk endlessly. Even at the very bottom of the backworlds discourse never ceases; books are only going to seek books; men play among themselves; words resound among themselves; history and the social sciences remain among themselves. We accused the Bible of obstructing knowledge; it would have been better to have accused the book in general, whose emblem the Bible bears, indeed, the written, language and the relations of men among themselves. Visitors of flesh and pale shades dialogue, converse about the struggles up above, watch the terrifying tortures, blind to the silent walls of the Underworld. Having a passion for vengeances and local history, nonetheless Dante alone describes, a bit, the worldly architecture of the backworlds. The other descenders continue, as above ground, to live among themselves. Perpetuating their earthly behaviour, they see rivals, never the river or its two riverbanks. Politics moves even the Underworld. Wounded by resentment, they remember the last quarter hour, never the millions of years preserved by the walls sending back to their ears the recent echoes of a history that separates them, deaf to the long silence that would unite them. These rivals from a short history have no idea that a common world, fantastically long, has formed their bones, their limbs and no doubt their speech. Behind the river Lethe, a darker forgetfulness awaits. They have no idea of it at all because neither the walls nor the earth talk, memory sites never activated into remembering. They need to be decoded; their silence needs to be translated into language.

For while living things enjoy memory and remembering at the same time, inert objects only dispose of the first – passive – one; they keep the treasure but don’t talk about it; we have to furnish them with the activity of remembering. Better yet, this mute memory defines the inert. What is a thing? A memory without remembering, a mnemonic passivity. Matter means mother: behind the short generations whose chattering shades hold forth, there is the vast genealogy of our mute mother, the Earth. The sciences decipher the silence of her womb. How?

Heat counts …

While the piled-up stratigraphy along which these descenders are walking preserves traces of time, it has the weakness of being cold, a bad clock. It indicates duration but only lets its flow be seen in the relative disposition of the strata, more or less thick, and in the slow wearing away of the rocks composing them. In cooling down, heat, a better time-counter, calculates faster. Buffon heated clay balls mixed with iron to incandescence and then let them cool down in order to calculate the age of the planet from these reduced models. Neither Newton nor his universe of forces has any memory; Buffon’s burning hot balls accumulate energy in the form of heat and therefore function as bank accounts spending their money as they cool down; here is a new clock. It doesn’t count the Newton-style reversible time indicated by my watch but the irreversible and entropic time of the wearing out of its parts, therefore of its ageing.

In the same way, descending deeper than Dante’s or Verne’s imagination, that is to say, from the visible and cold strata to the slow tectonic plates sailing on the burning hot magma, geophysicists discover that volcanic eruptions and earthquakes cadence, also like a clock, the cooling of the Earth: but its dial remains for the moment indecipherably irregular. The counting out of the bank account of the more or less burning hot celestial objects shows more regularity. We guess their heat by their colour and calculate, thanks to this mark, their age. And since we spot, on the spectrum of each one’s heat, a shift to the red, we assume an expansion of the Universe and calculate its proportion or Hubble constant.

... Less well than radioactivity

Later, the heat clock handed the reins over to radioactive time-counters. The true path doesn’t descend the infernal Avernus, near Naples, nor into Snæfellsjökull’s vent, in Iceland, through which Verne’s adventurers went, but rather descends the scale of miniaturization, going from crystal to molecules and from atoms to particles. By means of their continuous emission, radioactive elements spend these particles, very visibly. It suffices then to count the uranium and lead isotopes.

Newton’s clock time didn’t give things their age; Darwin’s opponents therefore were first recruited from Newtonians rather than from the religious. To attain irreversible time and be able to quantify it: Buffon, Fourier, Lord Kelvin, Hubble and a thousand others had to study heat, and Becquerel had to discover radioactivity; then uranium 235 and plutonium had to appear; after the Manhattan Project, the atomic bombs had to explode; the fall of asteroids had to be taken seriously; lastly Patterson had to find the right solution by dating five of these meteorites, including the one from Canyon Diablo in Arizona. How does uranium become transmuted into a base lead? The planet’s 4.55 billion years ensue from the answer to this question.

All things, in principle, act as memories. The bank-Universe contains accounts. All things are numbers; the memory-world preserves traces.

Defence and illustration of realism

Our ways of thinking are strongly sparked by the fact that this is how objects behave: subjects, we believe, human experts, date objects named by them, discovered by them, unearthed, purified, measured by them. The faculties of intelligence or memory, the acts of reading, writing, discerning, calculating, belong to them and not, obviously, to the objects they study.

The opposite idea, antiscientific, would return to animism. Yet, I have just called schists in strata, fossils, isotopes of lead or uranium memories. What could be more faithful, exact and reliable than these masses when compared to the countless tatters of human forgettings? Certain of these memories, emissive, even know how to count, particle by particle. Aren’t there then, in the things of the world, functions that we believe to be exclusive to human understanding? I’m not saying a soul – a vague name – but cognitive elements?

Idealism considers things to only exist in and through our representations, either individual and subjective, or collective, corporative, scientific, political. Realism believes they exist independent of us. I use the verb ‘to believe’ deliberately. For while idealism can indeed be proven since reasoning itself is situated on the side of the understanding and not on the side of the deaf and mute things, realism is only defended, as weakly as can be, by a belief stemming from the senses, from raw experience and even from religion, as some people claim. For realists believe in the reality of things the way mystics believe in God, from having experienced it. Despite this weakness, I have never been able to abandon realism, hard, for idealists, soft, seem to me to have never suffered from the world as such; raised in cotton, flabby and protected, the rich, the powerful and their children believe that everything in the world obeys them like their domestics.

But, in leaving aside this controversy, in which belief gives itself away, another argument appears, inspired by the disciplines I was just inspired by, stratigraphy, thermodynamics, radioactivity, even biochemistry: in real things one finds hiding, mumbling and commencing elementary functions we utilize – better and more completely or sometimes less regularly – in our representations. Thus, to take another example, in a thousand living species, sometimes highly ‘intelligent’ ones, we find scattered a thousand ways of communicating which are united and combined more completely by the performances of our language. We integrate the know-how of many living things; we do the same with the inert. Something of the cognitive lurks in life and matter.

The discussions that set realism and idealism in opposition attempt to interpret the phenomenon, that is to say, the appearance, the epiphany or the hidden, the hidden God itself, if you like; they therefore presuppose a vague space inside of which the scenes of representation are played but take little account of time, which is as universal as the Universe and more durable than all the things of the world. But precisely these latter memorize and remember. And myself, I remember in part because my body and brain, equipped with matters and forms similar to the matters and forms equipping things, also know how to accumulate and then discharge time. And we remember collectively because we knew how to exploit the properties of these same things which know how to write on each other, engravings with a chisel on marble, ink marks on white paper or electronic chip circuits. Insofar as I am memory, I participate in things. Insofar as they are things, they have memory. In this respect, the things and the world therefore exist neither more nor less than I or some collective in which I am immersed do. Idealism presupposes a fight from which we would emerge the victors; I see the match as balanced or nil. Worse, I no longer see the border separating and opposing men and world.

No, I am not returning to a decried animism; I am not saying that things have a soul, or evil or beneficent intentions. But in this apparently sterile direction, which nevertheless neither the Stoics nor Leibniz nor Bergson scorned, gold veins appear. The act of knowledge doesn’t link an active subject-pole to an other, a passive object, but rather both participate together in this act in which the games are shared, even if the latter of these two agencies only takes on a humble role. 11 This agency plays the first move and, with each renewal of the game, always plays the first move. If, keeping to the same methods, we had continued searching for the world’s age by means of the generations, the thickness of cliffs, thermal radiation, we would never have found the solution. Another object had to appear, some element in meteorites, in which a good memory lay. Things decide at least as much as methods. The real awakens the act of knowing that awakens it. Its faculties are joined to ours in a self-perpetuating cycle.

This conclusion is only bold in appearance, so much is it universally found. No doubt, by means of this couple – active subject, passive object – we were obeying, ourselves passive as well, the libido dominandi and our intense passion for dominance, always the first served. We were thus continuing the line of dingoes or elk, animals that, like us, submit to victors. Idealism amounts to a form of parasitic dominance. Realism practices symbiosis, plunges into the things and collaborates with them. Connaissance [knowledge], whose prefix links, in its genesis, subjects with the innermost qualities of objects, takes its place among our symbiotic acts. 12 A philosophy of nature restores the dignity of these memory-things, which we always forget.

Forgetfulness sites

Homo sapiens obliviosus. Not only do you and I forget, like absent-minded individuals, not only do our cultures and their history form their past through piled-up lies, but even our species’ DNA seems programmed for deprogramming. Not remembering oneself or history, losing even the species’ memory all condition learning, rapid adaptation, disobedience and invention. I think like a living thing having remembrances with holes in them, having a lacunary memory. Over the course of the Grand Narrative, forgetfulness little by little became the peculiarity of thought, if not of the human race; to such an extent that for millions of years we even forgot the world, whose enormous past we have only remembered for one or two generations.

We lived, we live, we think in forgetfulness sites, as on the alpine-pastured farm or before the Grand Canyon. Let’s not complain about this weakness nor about the evaporation of the past; without these faults, we would return to the hypermnesiac state of the cow or the hevea.

Let’s protest against the inverse tradition claiming flowing waters have no memory, against the Greek myth of the river of forgetfulness. On the contrary, every river digs its bed to preserve a place to sleep, thus giving itself up to its lability; so if you try, by diverting it, to extract it from this enormous memory, it will return, irremediably, to the thalweg, even if it takes a long time to do so. Despite what the song says, no one has ever seen the Garonne go and warm up the pole. 13 It reposes in its long pocket like a cow in its pasture-niche, an d when it overflows its little fold, it merely invades another bed, called the flood plain. Never did any river forget these two winding folds nor did its waters, whatever Heraclitus may still say about it: these waters evaporate or sometimes slip beneath the rocks and the flowers of the fields; should it rain, these same waves vaguely return, in a statistical cycle. Everyone always swims in pretty much the same river, stable course, soft banks and recurrent floods. The river displays broad and probable rhythms in the universal rhesis or fluence. It doesn’t flow so much as it percolates. It remembers, like all things.

All things are memories, even flowing waters. We alone forget that we are swimming in the same river: Heraclitus’ saying bears witness to our absent-mindedness. Absent-minded, we always think that a different river is making us wet. Our remembrances most often reduce to a few bits of amnesia, omission and negligence, hastily tied together. The formation of different matters as well as the evolution of living things list out memories that have an unyielding faithfulness, which is why all of them follow general and rational laws. Tattered and torn, with gaps, unfaithful, full of holes, only our life and our history know no rule, amid a world without forgetfulness. Honest, things tell true. Dishonest or distracted, we lie. And what if all our knowledge began with omissions? And what if our intelligence never stopped striving to patch up torn pieces of patching cloth?

We don’t live like the inert, endowed with memory and without remembrance, therefore subjected to laws, nor do we live like the other living things, endowed with remembrances, as individuals, and with memory, as a species. Our race lost them, like so many other functions and characteristics. In order to be able to regain them, we externalize them on to living things or objects, better endowed than we are from this point of view. Conversely, we live both like the inert, without remembering, and like living things, through some memory: we differ from them but participate in them.

The question of the subject

But, once again, who has memory? The tradition answers: humans, their cognition, their mnemonic function, their written, engraved or drawn traces, the ones they decipher. No, for the things themselves memorize all by themselves and directly. The past is inscribed in them; it suffices to decipher it there. Dust and air particles fall every year with the snow; the ice preserves them, and cores from the glaciers of Greenland rediscover the state of the atmosphere, to the month, as it was hundreds of thousands of years ago. The thickness of the ice plays the role of a memory.

Here, again, we become decentred. What we said about ourselves – language, traces, symbols, signs and meanings, writing and memory, cognition and cogito – is taken on and demonstrated by all things in some way. The Grand Narrative of vast time shunts the intermediary of memory through language. Hence the status of language and of our intelligence: intermediaries between the world and the world, between things and things, a sort of brief noise interference.

In praise of Sarah

A little scene, as an aside: the experimenter asks Sarah, the famous female chimpanzee, to put the animal faces on one side and the human faces on the other. In response, the chimp places the photos of dogs, cats, even those of her brothers, mother and father on the left, and then women and children on the right; coming to her own image, she throws it in with those of humans. Let’s congratulate Sarah, who, without mistake, defines them as animals that separate, choose and classify, understanding herself to be in that species because she herself indulges in classification.

But Sarah shows us another way, the way of the evolution separating us from her: even more ape, more animal and more thing than her, I descend duration to observe that dogs, with their noses, distinguish the aroma of some food or the scent of a receptive bitch; that, with their stereospecific sites or folds, proteins select certain proteins and reject others; that a given alcohol only reacts to this acid; that Maxwell’s demon sorts molecules that are cold and hot, slow and fast … Who or what then doesn’t separate? Bifurcations resolve the question of classification; they date the appearance of some property or other. Producing subjects or objects, time constructs what logic deconstructs. What activity isn’t shared with us by not only some animal but also by this plant, an alga, some crude body or one of its components? Rather than asking or undoing the absurd question of what is peculiar to humankind, let’s let time resolve it: during which epoch does the Grand Narrative invent some activity?

Things, codes, causes: Descent into knowledge

The stylus engraving the wax, the ink staining the papyrus or paper, the palette colouring the canvas, the chisel sculpting the marble, these objective or rather interobjective facts even condition human writing, the arts and our symbolic behaviour. With the same movement, we produce artificial memories, in libraries or server farms, and discover in crystals and molecules, pollens and stars the marks and traces of a sometimes colossal past. Commanding nature by obeying it is equally true for our cognitive performances.

The descending mass of ice forms and pushes moraines in front of it; these moraines result from this dynamic but also bear witness to it. When forces act, we call them causes, at the scale of high energy; but, at the scale of low energy, they leave marks. You see the moraine as either an effect or a fossil trace. Things don’t reduce to causes but also set down codes. Things act upon each other, of course, but also make signs to each other. There isn’t only physics in physics, or else we should distinguish two: mathematical physics (the mathematics of Timaeus, Galileo, Dirac) and the physics of Critias, long discredited; the physics that uses induction and the one that recounts the history of things; the one that experiments in the laboratory and the one that reconstructs the world for us. The second one returns, now exact, so that the two of them counterbalance each other: the first one seeks the effects of causes of course; the other one finds the marks of codes. The dated narrative takes place alongside refined experiments and reasoned equations. Hard things demonstrate a soft side; material [matérielles], of course, they too become engrammed and programmed like software. There is something of software in hardware [le matériel].

Not only in our brains but also in the Universe. ‘Nature’ is sown with programmes. Things, double, manifest causes and codes. Next to the physics of forces, we are lacking a general theory of marks, traces and signals to teach us to remember like the world and to remember the world, to write like it and on it; things are also symbols. There isn’t only chemistry in chemistry: why does some element react or not react in the presence of some other? Why then does it select it? What ‘faculty’ in it chooses it? Large masses write, molecules read. And, even more than the inert, the living writes, reads, decides, chooses, reacts; it was even long believed t o be endowed with intentions. An hour of biochemistry quickly convinces of the refined astuteness of proteins.

Does an intelligence of things exist? Of living things? Does the natural, as though in dormancy, prepare the cultural, in labour or in luminescence? The world’s background noise murmurs like a præ-cogitat.

The gnomon and the transcendental

This discovery has ancient letters: neuter in gender, the word ‘gnomon’, which in the Greek language designated the sundial’s axis, signified ‘that which understands, decides, judges, distinguishes, interprets, yes, that which knows’; as if a thing, already, knew. Intercepting the sunlight, its shadow writes, on the dial itself, a few events of the sky and of the Earth, the solstice, the equinox and the latitude of the site. It functions automatically. ‘Automatic’ means: without the intervention of intention, which is subjective and cognitive. The Indo-European men groups together under this root – a mental one – of the word ‘memory’: demented, commentary, mention, mendacity, monument, demonstration, watch [montre], money … as though, behind the manifest meaning, the word as well was behaving like the memory of the pages I have just written.

It can be said of the gnomon that ‘it knows’ the way it is said that it rains. The gnomon looks like a stylus, but no one holds it in their hand. Some things of the world give themselves to be seen to an object that shows them: entirely objective, theory does without any subject. A thing, the gnomon, intervenes in the world, and the world reads on itself the writing drawn by it. This type of intrahardware software conditions our cognitive performances, like a kind of objective transcendental.

Neither knowledge nor consciousness suddenly arises to form sapiens. The thousand elements of their makeup appear starting from the inert – writing – or from the living – reading, choosing, deciding … Plunged into the world, we continuously forget how, over a long time, a meaning appears there. Like a temporal transcendental, certain conditions for knowing date from hundreds of millions of years ago.

Our Grand Narrative reconstructs them.