Ecology and Topology in Michel Serres

The Itinerant Theorist: Nature and Knowledge/Ecology and Topology in Michel SerresAuthor(s): Paul A. HarrisSource: SubStance, Vol. 26, No. 2, Issue 83: An Ecology of Knowledge: Michel Serres: A SpecialIssue (1997), pp. 37-58Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3684695Accessed: 06/09/2010 18:40

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The Itinerant Theorist: Nature and Knowledge/Ecology and Topology in Michel Serres

Paul A. Harris

It is no longer incomprehensible that the world is comprehensible. (Hermes, 82-83)

Exchange as the law of the theoretical universe, the transport of concepts and their complexity, the intersection and overlapping of domains ... represents, expresses, reproduces perhaps the very tissue in which objects, things themselves, are immersed-the all-encompassing and diabolically complex network of inter-information.

(Hermes II, 15; cited in Harari and Bell, xxiii)

Theory on the Slipping Edge

Michel Serres might be termed an itinerant theorist because of the restless nature of his intellectual work. Serres has labored in several fields, including molecular biology and science fiction, topology and painting, linguistics and anthropology. In his writings he has wandered from ancient Rome to the disastrous Challenger launch, from the flooded banks of the Nile to polar floes in the Northwest Passage; he has passed by Oedipus's fateful crossroads and disappeared down manholes into bubbles of chaos; he has assumed various guises, including parasite, navigator, and tour

guide. The "itinerant theorist" appellation also applies because Serres

produces theoretical itineraries, in the triple sense of the word: a route, a record of a journey, and a guidebook. He seeks through these itineraries to weave together the fabric of knowledge into a "pattern that connects" (as Bateson called it) humans and the world. What Serres says of the Odyssey holds true for himself as well: "The global wandering, the mythical adven- ture, is, in the end, only the general joining of these [discrete] spaces, as if the object or target of discourse were only to connect, or as if the junction,

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38 Paul A. Harris

the relation, constituted the route by which the first discourse passes" (Hermes, 49).

Like Odysseus, Serres pursues intricate routes in the hope of getting back to the place where he truly belongs. But for Serres, the desired des- tination is not the domestic domicile and the familiar dog. Serres seeks something broader, more encompassing-what could be called the proper ecological niche for humans. In his vision, humans belong to the world in a simple, fundamental sense; ultimately, Serres insists, "nothing distin-

guishes me ontologically from a crystal, a plant, an animal" (Hermes, 83). In Serres's writing, this ontology joins up with a view that process, instability and disorder constitute the primary "state" of things, resulting in a world that at times comes to resemble Ovid's metamorphic natural order where animals, humans, things and ideas constantly turn into one another. Where does Serres himself figure in this world? "I am a whirlwind in turbulent nature" (Hermes, 121); "Who am I? A tremor of nothingness, living in a

permanent earthquake" (Contract, 124). While these proclamations clearly serve a rhetorical function, they also

bring to the surface a strong undercurrent of Serres's thought: a desire to efface the edge of difference between language and representation, to fuse knowledge and being. This aspect of Serres's work finds its most explicit, dramatic expression in The Natural Contract, which culminates in a celebra- tion of Serres's experience of the 1989 Loma Pieta quake in northern California. "I tasted joy during the earthquake that terrified so many people around me," Serres confesses. "All of a sudden the ground shakes off its gear: walls tremble, ready to collapse, roofs buckle, people fall, communications are interrupted, noise keeps you from hearing each other, the thin technological film tears . . . " (124). Serres seems to have felt a sublime if not erotic joy: "I saw her [the earth] formerly with my eyes and my understanding; at last, through my belly and my feet, through my sex I am her" (124). Transported out of his mind and engulfed by his body, Serres found in this moment an "ecstasy" in his visceral connection with "the background noise, the rumbling world" (124).1

Nature and Knowledge/Ecology and Interdisciplinarity

The sublime shock that Serres testifies to feeling during the earthquake figures as an irruption in the rhetoric of knowledge. The fissuring ground where the edges of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates slip past one another provides Serres with the appropriate setting for a new com-

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The Itinerant Theorist 39

prehension of the world. One could say that Serres attempts to evoke an

intimate, visceral knowledge of nature in order to redefine the nature of

knowledge. In her review of The Natural Contract, Malina Stefanovska

points out that "in his writing, rather than being posited as an outside

object, Nature is acknowledged as an inside force which breaks that discourse, and opens it up to a vigilant poetic meditation" (163-64). The

paradox involved in creating such a discourse is, of course, how to figure nature in such a way that it appears "inside" the discourse as if it came from outside it. And by extension, this paradox is related to a fundamental tension that drives Serres's writing, which wavers between a desire to

forge an unmediated connection with the world and his ongoing project2 to weave together an encyclopedic discourse that restores our connection to the world. But because it is the nature of knowledge in its institutionalized state to become increasingly specialized and insular, the very erudition that distinguishes Serres from his contemporaries is, ironically, precisely what threatens to insert a certain distance between the philosopher and the world.

Thus Serres's conception of knowledge as such, over and above the sheer range of his learning, is absolutely essential to his work. For Serres, knowledge is not about something; it is not of the order of representation or

critique. As played by Serres, the philosopher's role is to develop neither an ontology nor an epistemology exclusively, but an ecology in which

things and ideas interact. As a writer, Serres resembles the proverbial spider in its web: in spinning out the threads of his itineraries, Serres

engineers the "transport of concepts" whose "intersections and overlap- pings" are a part of "the very tissue in which things themselves are immersed." The web as a whole comprises what Serres calls the "diabolically complex network of the inter-information network." Consequently, Serres's writing displays a distinctly woven texture: his essays are hybrid offsprings, or, in Bruno Latour's apt metaphor, they enact "a crossover, in the genetic sense, whereby characters of one language are crossed with attributes of another origin" (Latour, 90-91), splitting off and exchanging entire portions and hereditary characteristics.

This method enables Serres to practice a specific kind of interdis-

ciplinarity. Rather than creating "interfaces" between given, static fields, he imbricates them in one another, revealing their hidden morphological analogies and negotiating local passages between them.3 Serres is thus able to mold disciplinary knowledge into a supple field, an "encyclopedic epistemology," in which he performs operations of "chance and invention" (Harari and Bell, xxix). Serres speaks almost literally when he stipulates

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40

that "knowledge as such is a space of transformation" (Parasite, 100). In another context, Serres has called this space the "tiers-instruit," the instruction one receives in a third place. The tiers-instruit occupies a between-

space; it is a threshold or boundary to be crossed, the space "through which one makes a transit" (Le Tiers-Instruit, 25).4 Serres's method, its flexibility and mobility, generates a transdisciplinary perspective that is inherently global.

Serres's global perspective expresses itself on the one hand through the huge claims that pepper his writing: in various places, Serres simply posits that all language originates in noise; that Zola discovered ther-

modynamics; that "geometry begins in violence and in the sacred" (Her- mes, 133). But for Serres, "global" applies not only at the level of knowledge but also at the level of the subject and object of knowledge: the theater of his philosophy is the globe itself. Serres believes that the ecological dimension has been suppressed in critical theory because "our culture abhors the world" (Contract, 3); it is interested in knowledge in opposition to or perhaps even at the expense of the natural world. But as the extensive damage done to the biosphere becomes more undeniably discernible, the very line between nature and culture begins to disappear. Simultaneously, the bio-

sphere enters the noosphere, the field of knowledge: "Global history enters nature; global nature enters history; this is something utterly new in

philosophy" (Contract, 4). This event manifests itself in critical theory and cultural studies as the addition of ecology as a fourth term in the

race/class/gender series (Conley, 77). In her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Cheryll Glotfelty puts the matter in terms that directly echo Serres: she writes that ecocriticism shifts the inflection of "the world" from encompassing the social sphere ex-

clusively to "an immensely complex global system, in which energy, mat-

ter, and ideas interact" (xix; original emphasis). From the global perspective Serres takes in The Natural Contract, the

nature of knowledge changes as the nature of nature undergoes fundamental change. Major upheavals in terrestrial ecology mean that ideas neces-

sarily interact with the biosphere. "Suddenly a local object, nature, on which a merely partial subject could act, becomes a global objective, Planet Earth, on which a new, total subject, humanity is toiling away" (5). In the

global ecology, metamorphosis-previously the dynamic force that gives us new organisms-occurs at the level of the species. Humanity is "no

longer swallowed up like a dimensionless point"; it "exists as a collectivity, transcending the local" (17-18).

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Paul A. Harris


Finally we have reached such sizes that we exist physically. The thinking individual, having become a beast collectively, is now joined to others in multiple ways and turns to stone. [... ] At last we exist on a natural scale. Mind has grown into a beast and the beast is growing into a [tectonic] plate. (Contract, 19)

Serres sketches a new conception of humanity as a geo-body-politic, and points toward a "geopolitics" inflected not through geography but geol- ogy. The change in metaphor displaces humanity from its primacy as the

subject of history that imposes itself on the world; rather, the species is a natural force whose eruptions change the course of global history, both natural and cultural. In this cartography, the topographically discrete ter- ritories of surface geography give way to topologically embedded, stratified layers fissured by earthquakes. (Topological mapping, as we shall see, is central to Serres's ecological model.)

This evolution of humanity to a global scale demands a new relation between humans and the environment. The social contract on which so much of western culture rests must be replaced by what Serres calls "the natural contract." Serres's notion of the natural contract grows out of his work on Lucretius and Epicurean philosophy, which opens a passage between social contract and natural context. In La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrece, Serres explicates the premise behind the Epicurean vision: social laws and writing derive from natural laws, because "history is a physics and not the inverse. Language is already in bodies" (Naissance, 186; my translation). This interpenetration of the semiotic and the material represents a literal extrapolation of the Lucretian conceit that compares atoms and letters: "That atoms are letters, that connected bodies are phrases, is no doubt not a metaphor, it is that without which there would be nothing in existence" (ibid., 185; my translation).

The appeal of the Lucretian model for Serres clearly stems from its

positing an essential freedom at its base. This cosmology casts both cultural and natural evolution as processes of perpetual transformation; unpredictable mutations occur because there are no global or completely deterministic "laws." "Nature does not code the universal," Serres writes, but "the clinamen," the unpredictable sway that throws atoms off their deter- minate courses and initiates change. The dinamen introduces a ripple in the fabric of the world that spreads outward: it "performs the first coding, it initiates a new temporality, writing, memory, reversibility and negentropy" (Naissance, 186; my translation).

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Eco-Pedagogy/Cultural Contract

The dinamen, then, is a physical law that conditions and resonates through the noosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere. It upholds an anti- deterministic philosophy of free will and acts as a guarantor of contingency, novelty and difference. In a typical crossover reading, Serres treats Lucretius's poem as a physics treatise that announces a "creative science of

change and circumstance" that in turn "breaks the chains of violence, interrupts the reign of the same," which characterize the ethos of modern science (Hermes, 100). Lucretius uses physics as a basis to explain and

justify humanity's place in the world. The physics of the clinamen portrays a fluid, dynamic world in which the "individual" or "system" is seen as

temporary form of emergent order within a pervasive, swirling chaos. Similarly, in The Natural Contract Serres searches out a "strong and simple science [that] will tell me the moment of denouement, of being stripped bare and untied, the moment of true casting off... from this earth toward the void" (Contract, 115).

This science can only germinate if institutional structures are

rethought, of course. As is so often the case, Serres incorporates ethical and

pedagogical issues into his interdisciplinary inventor's laboratory.5 In an

approach reminiscent of Gregory Bateson, Serres diagnoses the "cultural

pathologies" inherent in the organization of knowledge that inscribe lines of power and the insistence of desire in destructive ways. Serres sees predominant western educational practices informed by "the narrow finitude of an instruction that produces obedient specialists or ig- noramuses full of arrogance," leaving minds prey to "the infinity of desire,

drugging tiny soft larvae to death" (Contract, 96) 6 For Serres, a science that will enable us to "cast off" with maximum freedom from constraint simul-

taneously must be predicated on our accepting the finitude of our being and ecosystem.

In order to fulfill "the natural contract," knowledge must always operate on several levels and be embedded in multiple contexts. Conse-

quently, Serres depicts the natural contract as a rope woven out of three strands: the definition of a field or object of work; a link with a subject; an

intersubjective linkage. In Serres's account of these three strands, we can see how the natural contract brings together the concepts, discourses and domains that have always been central to his work:

these practices concern, respectively, form, energy, and information; they are, if you will, conceptual, material, and judicial; geometric, physical, and legal. Bonds of knowledge, of power, and of complexity. All in all, its triple

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stress links me to forms, to things, and to others, and thus initiates me into abstraction, the world, and society. (Contract, 107-08)

The natural contract implicates us in a complex set of interlocking practices premised on an urgent awareness of the multiple linkages between local action, global history and the biosphere. Serres's conception of the natural contract clearly does not espouse a simple championing of or return to "nature," but points the way toward a new kind of ecological discourse.

This discourse could be characterized as what William Paulson calls "cultural ecology." Cultural ecology, like Serres's work, situates

knowledge in a complexly layered space where it interacts with nature and culture.7 As Paulson puts it, the "recursive and multilayered contextualiza- tion" of knowledge that defines cultural ecology "is itself a form of

knowledge, designated in different sites by terms such as ecology, context

theory, cybernetic holism, or complex adaptive systems" ("Cultural Ecol-

ogy," 27). Informed by an epistemology common to all these sites, cultural

ecology eschews any critical stance or privileged purchase on the world: it has "neither existence nor meaning outside of [its] relation to this techno- economic environment" (ibid., 27). The turn marked by cultural ecology parallels that taken by cultural anthropology: if the latter supplants a universal notion of the human with localized analyses of "culture," especially as it is expressed through narratives, then cultural ecology compli- cates the nature/culture binary by treating natural systems as being always imbricated in cultural formations, and social categories as necessarily con- strained by organic ones. Cultural ecology yokes together scientific

knowledge and cultural studies in a single discourse-exactly what Serres has done all along.

Topology

As we have seen, the conceptual underpinnings of Serres's ecological and interdisciplinary discourse rest in its ability to move fluidly between the local and the global. One could say that Serres enmeshes a rhetoric of the local in a web of global connections. A sampling of Serres's rhetoric shows how extensively it favors chaos and contingency, the local and the circumstantial; at the same time, he draws out analogies between very disparate disciplines on a global, conceptual plane by demonstrating that an isomorphic set of structural relations persists in or between two different discourses. It is therefore crucial to understand Serres in terms of the

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44 Paul A. Harris

"space" in which his work's itineraries unfold. From our discussion it is dear that this space exhibits certain properties: it accommodates local contingency within global consistency; it is not a fixed topography with different regions (i.e., disciplines) but a malleable surface, subject to being stretched and folded (discourses are constantly mixed together). We could say that Serres works both in and on this type of space: it not only informs all his writings, but he has also theorized this space explicitly.

On the global level, Serres's work derives from an encounter with structuralism-not the structuralism of linguistics or anthropology but a mathematical structuralism. Serres's concept of structure comes from the work of Bourbaki, the mathematicians' collective that attempted to sys- tematize all mathematics into abstract syntactic relationships. In the first Hermes volume Serres defines structure as

an operational set of undefined meaning ... bringing together a certain number of elements whose content is not specified, and a finite number of relations of unspecified nature, but whose function, and certain results concerning the elements, are specified. (Cited in Paulson, Noise, 32).8

Nothing of the content or nature of the elements need be known; only the relations among them. Thus Serres insists that in his work, "I only describe relationships. . . . let's be content with saying it's 'a general theory of relations."' (Conversations, 127).

The discourse that provides Serres with the means to map out a

generalized space of relationships is topology. This "space" spans relations and configurations in the spaces of nature, discourse, and culture. Topol- ogy accommodates itself to these adaptations because it offers a supple and quite abstract vocabulary of relations and transformations. Topology is concerned with properties of space that remain constant under transformations; it analyzes the boundaries of spatial configurations. In abstract terms, topology poses problems of spatial relations through questions such as: "What is closed? What is open? What is a connective path? What is a tear? What are the continuous and discontinuous? What is a threshold, a limit?" (Hermes, 44). The conceptual nature of topology imagines "space" as being supple and malleable rather than rigid and fixed. Serres likes to draw a contrast between topology, "the science of nearness and rifts," and metrical geometry, "the science of stable and well-defined distances" (Con- versations, 60). Topology thus provides a kind of syntax and vocabulary for figuring abstract relationships between terms in the nodes and passages of the "inter-information network."

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Once language itself is imagined as a network, then its space can best be understood in terms of topology. A central and immensely productive axiom in Serres's study of Lucretius is that "the semiotic is above all a topology" (Naissance, 179; his emphasis). In the linguistic field, topological relations are most visibly expressed in prepositions. Topology in general and

prepositions in particular share concerns with modes of linkage, and are therefore intrinsic to figuring the space-between. In order to describe the most intricately configured spaces,

one must use between, in, through with circumspection . . . operators of flexions or declinations that designate . .. connections and relations of vicinity, proximity, distance, adherence or accumulation, in other words, positions. (Atlas, 71, italics added)9

Topology is intrinsic to Serres's cultural ecology because it informs his notion of culture. Topology provides a means of conceptualizing ecologies as networks of relations or the tissue or weave of connections between different spaces within a given context. "In general a culture constructs in and by its history an original intersection between such spatial varieties, a node of very precise and particular connections" (Hermes, 45). Topology elucidates the formative boundaries and constitutive limits that define culture because a given topology acts as a system of constraints on what forms are allowed. The incest prohibition, for example, can be figured in terms of the distinction between open and closed spaces central to topology:

"Enclosed" means isolated, closed, separated; it also means untainted, pure and chaste. Now, that which is not chaste, incestus, can be incest. The incest prohibition is, then, literally a local singularity exemplary of this operation in general, of the global project of connecting the disconnected, or the op- posite, of opening what is closed ... (Hermes, 45)

Textual Operators

So far I have traced an itinerary through Serres's work primarily around the categories of ecology and topology. Now I want to explore how these dimensions of Serres's writing can be translated into the context of American literary theory and ecocriticism. A central methodological issue in ecocriticism is how to approach literary texts from an ecological standpoint. In its early stages of development, ecocriticism has tended to take a somewhat thematic angle on this issue, asking how nature is repre- sented in a text, the role of setting, the ethical and ecological values upheld, and so on.10 But moving beyond the level of representation, we may ask

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what an ecological concept of texts themselves would be. Here William Rueckert offers a view that resonates with Serres's Epicurean outlook: Rueckert posits that "a poem is a stored energy, a formal turbulence, a

living thing, a swirl in the flow," and that "poems are part of the energy pathways that sustain life" (Rueckert, 108). In the greater ecology of Serres's work, literary texts do indeed function as "formal turbulences" or

"energy pathways." They are embedded in a transdisciplinary setting where they serve as what Serres calls "operators," nodes that establish links across scales and levels of life and between domains of experience and knowledge. Seen through the lens of Serres, fictional discourse is not

only semio- or psycho-logical but eco-logical as well: it expresses the logic of oikos, home; fiction negotiates a place and passage in the world.11

The question simply becomes, of course, how one implements such

general pronouncements. What theoretical model enables the text to function as a vital energy in some ecology? What method of reading opens the semiotic dimension onto the ecological? And, given Serres's pursuit of a discourse where "nature is an inside force that breaks that discourse," we need to ask what the literary contributes to such a discourse. These questions all hinge on the relation between the semiotic and the "natural" or the material, a problem to which Serres's work provides a powerful response. Here it becomes crucial to reassert Serres's basic modus operandi: all

knowledge circulates in an encompassing ecology. "Things" in this ecol-

ogy, such as philosophical concepts, literary texts, and scientific theories, are configured as topologies.

This method enables one to move fluidly from "within" the text to

mobilizing the text in some larger web of relations. The topological approach "within" a text identifies the patterns that function on and connect all its levels: topology adduces homologies among the figures, style, form and theme of a work, even revealing how these patterns are replicated in the often inert categories of setting and plot. Put differently, one could say that Serres shows how to search out the underlying autopoietic principles of a text: how do the metrical, metaphorical and formal dynamics display self-similarity? The difficulty in reading or perhaps adequately appreciat- ing Serres is that he does not set out to demonstrate isomorphic structural

patterns that obtain across different textual levels; rather, he presumes them from the outset, treating them as a text's primary "operators." Once a textual operator is adduced, it can move inside the text or set the text in

play with other discursive fields. Generally speaking, an operator for Ser- res is a concept or trope that opens cross-disciplinary passages and

transcodings. Operators thus can move within a discourse or across boun-

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daries in any direction. Mathematical and scientific terms and concepts also serve as operators; for Serres they remain less useful "as an object or a domain [in themselves] than as a set of operators, a method or strategy for

working on formations different from itself' (Hermes, 39). Because Serres does not grant primacy to any single discipline, he uses

operators to effect translations in either direction between the natural sciences and literature: how does a scientific term work as an operator in or on a text; or conversely, what is the physics displayed in a text? For in-

stance, a major thrust of Serres's analysis of De Rerum Natura is to recon- nect Lucretian physics and poetics: to answer "why this physics text is a

poem" by performing an "application of the physics of textures to the text that announces it" (Naissance, 168; my translation). Serres uses several

strategies to fulfil this task, from generating a language that crosses over

physics and poetics through wordplay (e.g., "vers" and "verseau") to iterat-

ing a spiral pattern common to turbulent flows, several images in the text, and its overall form.12 The danger of ignoring the physics in Lucretius's

poem is that "it cuts Lucretius off from the world," whereas a transdisciplinary treatment of the text marks how its poetics, physics, ethics and

metaphysics all replicate one another and are woven together in the body of the work. In weaving together the different dimensions or "spaces" of a fictional text, then, Serres simultaneously demonstrates how literature weaves together the fabric of culture and, without recourse to theological explanation, defines humanity's place in a natural order. In the Epicurean world Lucretius depicts, "the science of things and the science of man go hand in hand, in identity" (Hermes, 121).

Becoming Melville/Olson

If we want to adhere to Serres's modus operandi in writing about him, then we do not seek to "apply" his work to something. It is rather a

question of crossing Serres together with other work. One makes "Serres" an "operator" in a hybrid discourse whose texture and method owe as much to his example and method as his specific theoretical claims. In order to translate Serres into the context of American literature and theory, then, I will briefly read Melville's Moby-Dick in terms of the ecological and

topological aspects of Serres's work.13 The novel lends itself to Serres's

approach for several reasons: its incorporation of several discourses, its combination of social vision and natural philosophy, and the self-similarity of its different spaces, from the depiction of the ocean to the work of

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whaling, from its syntactical patterns to its view of social relations. One could also say that for Melville, as for Serres, nature remains intractable to analysis; Melville, too, seeks to figure nature as an interior force that ir- rupts from the outside. Finally, in more abstract terms, the "space" of Moby-Dick-both its textual space and the physical geography-displays a distinct, continuous topology.

Melville's writing has been analyzed in terms of topology by Charles Olson, who is one of the few kindred spirits of Serres in American literature and criticism. Like Serres, Olson pursues a vision of truly interdisciplinary knowledge and draws on several fields in formulating conceptual models, which are then translated into their wider cultural implications. Speaking of his un-disciplined pedagogical practice at the Black Mountain School, Olson proclaims, "if there are no walls, there are no names ... and the work of the morning is methodology. How to use yourself and on what" ("Present Is Prologue," 40).14 And Olson's writings on Melville are among the few possible American analogues to Serres's work.

Both Olson and Serres find in late nineteenth-century mathematics a discourse of the continuous that expresses a new relation between the subject, space and the world. Olson extrapolates from Lobatschewsky and Riemann a vision of space in which

Nothing was now inert fact, all things were there for feeling, to promote it, and be felt; and man, in the midst of it, knowing well how he was folded in, as well as how suddenly and strikingly he could extend himself. . . was suddenly possessed or repossessed of a character of being, a thing among things, which I shall call a physicality. ("Equal," 47-48)

This vision of the human's in-folded physicality follows in the Lucretian

spirit of restoring humans to nature. Serres extrapolates from Lucretius a view of the human as a temporary swirl or eddy that emerges against the

negentropic stream of time: "I am a disturbance, a vortex in turbulent nature," Serres proclaims; "The wrinkles on my brow are the same as the

ripples on the water" (Hermes, 121). The continuous, fluid space in which Moby-Dick unfolds and Serres

works runs counter to our Cartesian habits of thought and writing, which

operate in a world of discrete objects and separate fields. But the discursive fields of Melville and Serres, one could say, function according to a distinct

physics. Olson confronts the difference it makes to operate in a world with a continuous topology: "What is measure when the universe flips and no

part is discrete from another part except by the flow of creation itself, in and out, intensive where it seemed before qualitative, and the extensive

exactly the widest, which we also have the powers to include?" ("Equal,"

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48). How do relations between things work in a world where there is no

impact between solid bodies, no clear demarcation of the boundaries of discrete things? What do terms (used by Olson) like "action" and

"physicality" mean when we are in a continuous field of energies? And, on another level, what kind of discourse expresses or embodies this world?

Here Melville's forays into cetology-often disdained by literary critics who see them as not literary-play a crucial role, for they help adduce a physics of the continuous. At the same time, of course, the chapters reveal the limits of natural science as a form of knowledge; Ishmael

constantly reminds us that the mystery of the whale lies outside this discourse. Still, just as Lucretius uses Epicurean atomism as a basis for ethics, Melville's cetological chapters lay a certain foundation in physics for the

metaphysics of the whale. This is in large part because Melville creates a

cetology that exceeds natural scientific knowledge. For instance, Ishmael

provides a topological theory of one of the more mysterious aspects of the whale- the internal composition of its forehead. Topology is often thought of as geometry on rubber sheets, because it entails stretching and folding surfaces; the boundaries of inside and outside in topology, of container and contained, can be constantly folded and transformed. In meditating on the whale's "battering ram," its formidable forehead, Melville formulates a remarkable thesis involving a continuous contact between its interior and exterior:

considering... the inexplicable manner in which he now depresses his head altogether beneath the surface, and anon swims with it high elevated out of the water; considering the unobstructed elasticity of its envelop; considering the unique interior of its head; it has hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those mystical lung-celled honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto unknown and unsuspected connexion with the outer air, so as to be susceptible to atmospheric distension and contraction. If this be so, fancy the irresistibleness of that might, to which the most impalpable and destructive of all elements contributes. (285)

The imposing "battering-ram," then, turns out to be a permeable membrane, a topologically continuous surface that connects inside and outside in the manner of a Moebius strip. The alternating movement of the head beneath and then out of the water is conveyed by the rhythm of Melville's series of phrases, and both image and style mimic the oscillating "distension and contraction" of the lungs and the elements. The intricate

interiority of the lungs becomes the in-folded extension of the outside air.

Clearly, in Melville's cetology, the boundaries between scientific knowledge and philosophical speculation become effaced.

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The passage also underscores the scaling nature of this space. Scaling implies self-similarity across different scales, the embedding and connection among different scales in a single context. Since it seeks passages connecting the local and the global, scaling is a primary feature of Serres's work. Olson sees scaling as an intrinsic part of topological thought, for

only the topological "explains Melville's unique ability to reveal the very large ... by the small" ("Equal," 49). The power of the whale's forehead, for example, results from a linkage across scales, an interconnection between the "impalpable" air in the lungs, the "elasticity" of the forehead "envelop," and the whale's fluid motion.

Filtered through the lenses of Serres's work, the tropes of Moby-Dick become a set of topological operations. Several tropes and images in the novel can be read as versions of a topological operation known as the "baker transformation" or "horseshoe." As its name indicates, the baker transformation takes a space and stretches it out one way, then squeezes it in another, and then folds it over. This kind of spatial kneading is enacted in "A Squeeze of the Hand," the chapter in which Ishmael relates how the whale's sperm, once cooled down, becomes lumpy, and the lumps must be

squeezed until the sperm returns to liquid form. Just as the baker transformation constantly changes the topology of a shape, Ishmael's stretching and squeezing involves a phase change from solid to liquid. The human

body is also transformed, as it molds itself to the activity until Ishmael's hand traces the intricately curved contours of the shapes for which continuous topologies are known: "After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and

spiralize" (348). The "serpentine and spiralized" shapes figured in the

image provide an example of what Olson calls "the elliptical and hyper- bolic spaces" Melville creates ("Equal," 50).

The most enigmatic, dynamic and formidable "force" in the complex topology of Melville's space is Moby-Dick. Several striking descriptions of

Moby-Dick simply swimming express the continuous, enfolded nature of

space in this world. The most autonomous presence in the ocean, the one who brings its fluid force to a head or dense point, Moby-Dick nevertheless remains immersed in his encompassing, fluid element. When the crew is

pursuing Moby-Dick, Ishmael recounts how "his entire hump was distinct-

ly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam" (447). Spatial distinctions blur here: the whale is both above and below the surface, and the boundary of the whale's form is marked by the intricately patterned foam ring whose delicate texture replicates the honeycombed interior of the hump. Moby-

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Dick's swath through the water becomes a concert of forces, hues, and

patterns: "Before it... went the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving val-

ley of his steady wake; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced

by his side" (447). Following Serres, we may break the description down into its prepositional linkages, and discover a constant folding over: "before" and "behind" give way to "accompanying" and "interchange-

ably"; the dynamics of Melville's syntax transform a description of the whale swimming into an evocation of the medium that envelops the whale; the whale and ocean merge in an entangled play of forces.

The harmonious resonance of elements (air bubbles, flowing water, a

supple body) and forces in the passage persists amid a highly turbulent motion. This combination of resonance and turbulence is another example of scaling: one of the major insights provided by models of turbulence in chaos theory is that fluid turbulence displays an intricately nested, self- similar pattern of swirls within swirls.'5 Thus the churning waters stirred

by the immense whale actually comprise a complex internal order and

economy of forces. Precisely this form of turbulence is one of Serres's favorite tropes, for it signals a disorder that harbors a different form of order. Translating Melville's imagery back into Serres, we might liken the

description of Moby-Dick swimming to Venus rising from the waves, "Venus turbulente,"16 an image Serres uses to express the emergence of order (Venus as an avatar of Eros) from chaos.17

For Olson, Melville's concrete physical descriptions of this kind reveal

nothing less that "the actual character and structure of the real itself." The structure of a real made up of a "flow . . . in and out, intensive," is

composed most essentially of a tension between motion and rest. As Olson

points out, Melville joins "the feeling or necessity of the inert... to the most instant and powerful actions" ("Equal," 51). An exemplary passage in this regard is Melville's expression for how Moby-Dick moves in the water: "A gentle joyousness-a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale" (447). The texture of the real, Olson argues, is composed of a "flexible inertial field" ("Equal," 52). Topology is critical to understanding the nature of forms in this medium because it provides a means to perceive and describe fluid, dynamic shapes defined less by distinct outline than scaling properties. Topology thus sharpens perception and

simultaneously conceptualizes the spatial attributes of perceived shapes because it makes one "able to discriminate and get in between the vague

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52 Paul A. Harris

types of form morphology offers and the ideal structures of geometry proper" ("Equal," 49).

Olson's formulation is particularly interesting in a contemporary context because it reads like an anticipation of the proclamation Benoit Man- delbrot18 makes in the opening of The Fractal Geometry of Nature: "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line .... Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of

complexity." Mandelbrot thus proposes that fractal geometry provides a

"morphology of the 'amorphous'"' (1). The scaling properties of fractals are what enable such a morphology to emerge; irregular shapes like clouds and mountains have a consistency, a degree of roughness that obtains across all scales, expressed as their fractal dimension.

Topology and Impalpability

However, there is a crucial difference in inflection between Mandel- brot's rhetoric and that of Serres and Olson. For Mandelbrot, fractal

geometry represents a new, better mathematical language of nature: simple equations can be iterated to produce magnificently complex forms that resemble "nature" more closely that Euclidean geometry. I would place Serres's use of topology and fractals differently though; his work upholds a metaphysics in which morphological discourses reach limits where an essential formlessness or opacity of the world is revealed. Or rather, in his

Epicurean meta-physics, there is no "bottom" or minimal building block in the world because "the clinamen performs the first coding": beneath the foundation is a ground, but it is always in the process of a shearing away; the eddy's temporary stability emerges out of a primary turbulence.

If read through Serres rather than Mandelbrot, the discourse of mathematical exactitude that fractal geometry represents harbors its own ver-

tiginous undoing. Even as scaling indicates a new way of perceiving spatial order and form, the very nature of scaling also harbors a quality of

groundlessness or impalpability. The movement "down" scales, through a

process called recursive deletion, brings one into a realm of imperceptible dust. Take the iterative operation that generates the Cantor set, for instance: begin with a bar, cut out the middle third; then cut out the middle third of each resulting bar, and so on-"ad infinitum," as the textbooks say. The only trouble is, one cannot simply keep going on infinitely in any embodied sense-one meets instead with the dissolution of the spatial

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52 Paul A. Harris


form. This is the thrust of Brian Rotman's thesis in Ad Infinitum: a "cor-

porealized mathematics," Rotman argues, necessitates "a radically new

conception of iteration [that] replaces the endless repetition of the orthodox

picture, the iteration of the same, by an entropic diminuendo" (10-11). Thus, rather than thinking of self-similarity across scale extending infinite-

ly down, the components involved in the iterative operation

are seen to dissipate, fade out and become indeterminate as counting them into being is ever further prolonged-an indeterminacy that seems closer to our actual experience of iteration than any transcendentally mysterious infinitude. (11)

Returning to the fluid world of Serres-Olson-Melville, we could say that even as topology enables one to discern complex forms in a supple medium, the fluid nature of the medium itself effaces the contours of forms and leaves one at sea. The topology and physics of the world soon merge into a metaphysical and overtly mystical realm. Ecology confronts its own limits, beyond which lie paths leading to a return to various forms of animism or a silence, a respectful distance. The way in which physicality merges into mysticism in Melville is made clear in "The Whiteness of the Whale," where whiteness functions as an irreducibly plural sign, both a

bodily quality and an uncanny signifier that points into a void. Similarly, Melville's last depictions of Moby-Dick imbue his tremendous physical presence with a nebulous quality. On the final day of the chase, the whale

emerges from the waters in a much more chaotic manner: "Suddenly the waters around them swelled in broad circles; then quickly upheaved, as if

sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface ... and then ... a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea" (464). The abrupt motion and tangential movement of the whale signals his imminent disappearance beyond the sailors' ken.

Even though he is the most discernible form amid the amorphous depths of the ocean, Moby-Dick finally dissipates into an impalpable trace. "Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep" (464). The mist, the last visible trace left by the whale, is the exemplary sign of its irreducib-

ly mysterious nature. In the chapter entitled "The Fountain," Ishmael observes that when the whale "is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist

enveloping it," one cannot distinguish that cascading water from the mist, nor can one ever tell whether the spout is air or water or-Ishmael's

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54 Paul A. Harris

hypothesis-"nothing but mist" (313). The boundaries of the whale's form and the nature of its expelled breath suddenly become entirely nebulous, cloudy. At bottom, this image awakens "thick mists of dim doubts" in Ishmael's mind, "doubts of all things earthly" (314). Beneath the complexly folded surface of Serres's writing there lies a similar skepticism. Serres sees the texture of the world as an irreducible, constantly shifting multiplicity. By nature, "[The multiple] is perhaps somewhat viscous" (Gen?se, 19). As Maria Assad points out, this statement "undermines the certainty of

being": it hesitates to pronounce ("perhaps somewhat") reality anything at all-even "multiple" or "viscous" ("Tropography," 281). A viscous multi-

plicity, composed perhaps, of... nothing but mist. One very concrete reason that the real seems elusive, if not illusory, is

the transience of all "things." In the turbulent world of the continuous, temporary forms of order ultimately return to chaos: "the vortices will come undone . .. all these disturbances will return to the original stream-

ing" (Hermes, 121). Serres's image replicates the last sight we have of the

Pequod: "And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its

crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight" (469). For Melville, the vortex swallowing the

Pequod is on the one hand an image of the self-destruction inherent in the drive for mastery Ahab embodies in the novel; on the other hand, the vortex is a gateway of both death and life, as Ishmael emerges from it on

Queequeg's coffin. Similarly, for Serres, the dissolution of the vortices of life represents a "natural process," part of the cycle of life in a dissipative, entropic stream of time.

Home At-Las(t)

Serres recombines discourses and knowledges into new configurations, negotiating passages and creating openings in the fabric of culture, in order to create niches in a landscape adapted to the changing conditions of the contemporary world. In this respect, Serres practices cultural ecology at its etymological roots (ecology, from oikos, Greek for house). At the core of the quickly growing interest in eco-criticism is the simple sense-produced by complex factors-that now, as humanity becomes a quaking presence in the biosphere, it must come to realize anew that the earth is our home and demands care. Ecological discourse is capable of contributing to this care because it represents a cultural site where technological development,

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scientific knowledge and a higher ethical (if not spiritual) calling can con-

verge within a set of reality, pleasure and moral principles alike. 19 Verena

Conley, for instance, yokes together feminist discourse, Guattari's

"ecosophy," and a critical evaluation of technologies in order to show that "the world... needs to be treated with tact, and treated with patience" (89).

A central challenge facing cultural ecology is to reimagine our home in terms of how technologized and virtual environments intersect with the biosphere. This project is at the heart of Serres's Atlas (1994), a narrative framed as a journey that explores both virtual spaces and various

geographies in order to fold together the natural, textual and the tech-

nological. Here a more worldly Serres offers a kind of retropsective resum6 that weaves together several strands of his work. But the maps drawn in Atlas also include unexpected sites: the last sojourn recounts a journey to Tibet inflected through the lenses of Tintin, the abominable snowman, and

Chuang Tzu's butterfly dream. This trip is less like a New Age spiritual quest into a comic-book Buddhism than a revamped journey across the tundra searching out Frankenstein's monster; but Serres seeks out a more beneficient relation between human and machine, flesh and digital domains. His Atlas comprises a "carte du Tendre-verbe et adjectif," a map both of tender in the adjectival sense and the verb tendre, to hold out, to

pitch a tent or spread a sail. In short, Serres seeks to stretch out and across

spaces in order to move toward the next fold, a possible and more tenable future.

In the conclusion of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Marco Polo, peering into Kublai Khan's imperial atlas, searches out "an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd." Using these components, Polo seeks to "'put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them"' (164). In answer to Khan's entropic vision that "'the last landing place can only be the infernal city,"' Polo articulates a new creed:

There are two ways to escape [the inferno of the living]. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. (165)

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56 Paul A. Harris

Serres, sharing his longtime friend Calvino's vision, has done much to

preserve value amid the constant encroachments of destructive narrow-

mindedness in institutionalized knowledge. Combining a classical training and sensibility with an ability to absorb contemporary trends and exper- tise, Serres offers tools necessary to find and preserve the differences that

can make a difference.

Loyola Marymount University

WORKS CITED

Assad, Maria L. "Michel Serres: In Search of a Tropography." In Hayles, ed.: 278-298.

. "Portrait of a Nonlinear Dynamical System: The Discourse of Michel Serres." SubStance 71/72 (XXII, #s 2&3): 141-51.

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine, 1972.

. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Bantam, 1979.

Batt, Noelle. "'L'Entre-Deux,' A Bridging Concept for Literature, Philosophy, and Science." SubStance 74 (XXIII, no. 74, 1994): 38-48.

Brown, Kenneth A. Cycles of Rock and Water: Upheaval at the Pacific Edge. New York: Harper-Collins, 1993.

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Trans. Warren Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Conley, Verena Andermatt. "Eco-Subjects." In Conley, ed., Rethinking Technologies. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1993: 77-91.

Gelley, Alexander. Narrative Crossings. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 1987.

Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Harari, Josu6 V., and David F. Bell. "Introduction: Journal a plusieurs voies." In Serres, Hermes (1982): ix-xl.

Hayles, N. Katherine, ed. Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Science and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca: Comell University Press, 1990.

Kauffman, Stuart. At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Latour, Bruno. "The Enlightenment without the Critique: A Word on Michel Serres's Philosophy," in A. Phillip Griffiths, ed. Contemporary French Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987: 83-98.

Mandelbrot, Benoit B. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. New York: Freeman, 1983.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 1967.

Olson, Charles. "Equal, That Is, To The Real Itself." In Selected Writings, ed. Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions, 1966: 46-52.

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. "The Present Is Prologue." Additional Prose: A Bibliography on America, Proprioception, and Other Essays. Bolinas, CA: Four Seasons Foundation, 1974.

Paulson, William. "Literature, Knowledge, and Cultural Ecology." SubStance 71/72 (XXII, #s 2 & 3,1993): 27-37.

. The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Rotman, Brian. Ad Infinitum: The Ghost in Turing's Machine. Stanford: Stanford Univer- sity Press, 1993.

Rueckert, William. "Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism." In Glot- felty and Fromm, eds.: 105-123.

Serres, Michel. Atlas. Paris: Julliard, 1994.

, with Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Trans. Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell, eds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

.Hermes IV: La Distribution. Paris: Minuit, 1977.

."Literature and the Exact Sciences." SubStance 59 (1989): 3-34.

.La Naissance de la Physique dans le texte de Lucrece. Paris: Minuit, 1977

.The Natural Contract. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Stefanovska, Malina. Review of Le Contrat Naturel. SubStance 67 (Vol.XXI, no. 2), 1992: 161-64.

NOTES

1. The ecstatic experience Serres recounts was not shared by others, of course. For a very different account of the Loma Pieta quake, see Brown, Cycles of Rock and Water (1993).

2. Apparently, Serres sketched out his entire intellectual project and map of knowledge at a very early stage in his career, and his voluminous work has adhered to this vision quite strictly.

3. For Serres's critique of the "interface" metaphor, see his remarks in a workshop in Livingston, ed., pp. 251-58. For Serres's vision of interdisciplinary passages, see especially Hermes V: Le Passage du Nord-Ouest (Paris: Minuit, 1980).

4. For a treatment of the in-between as a conceptual operator for interdisciplinary work (in which Serres is treated briefly), see Batt (1994).

5. For one of Serres's more explicit meditations on pedagogical issues, see "Literature and the Exact Sciences."

6. Compare Serres's analysis with Bateson's discussions of cultural pathologies in "Conscious Purpose versus Nature" in Steps To An Ecology of Mind and "'Time is Out of Joint," the Appendix in Mind and Nature.

7. Paulson's notion of "cultural ecology" no doubt has been shaped in part by his extensive work on Serres. See his chapter on Serres in The Noise of Culture (pp. 30-52).

8. For an explication of Serres's concept of structure, see Paulson, Noise, p. 32f. 9. For an example of how Serres studies the topological relationships expressed

in prepositions, see the treatment of Maupassant's tale "The Horla" in Atlas, pp. 61-85.

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10. For an overview of the questions ecocriticism poses about texts, see Glotfelty. 11. See Serres's remarks in "Language and Space" on Oedipus ("this is a discourse

that weaves a complex ..., that connects a network, that traces a graph upon space" (47)) and The Odyssey.

12. Here I would disagree with the critique Hayles (1990) makes of Serres. Hayles observes that Serres's own essays display a spiral form, but she insists that the turbulence at the heart of Lucretian physics "cannot be modeled as a spiral, which is far too orderly to express its extreme complexity." Hayles claims that "Serres does not so much express turbulence, then, as tame it" (202). This seems to read Serres against rather than with the grain of his discourse; one might say that Hayles, in literalizing the spiral metaphor into a spatial model or geometric figure, tames the noise and turbulence of Serres. For a different treatment of the problem of how Serres attempts to write turbulence, see Assad (1991).

13. For a fruitful reading of Melville in terms of Serres, see Alexander Gelley's use of Serres's parasite in reading Melville's The Confidence-Man, in Gelley, pp. 79-100.

14. The first time I heard Serres speak I wondered, echoing Olson's phrase, how to use Serres and on what. Serres's thought can induce a drug-like effect-I remember his lecture evoking a futuristic city composed of elements from ancient metropolises, combining realistic detail and a fantastic conception in a way reminiscent of an invisible city of Calvino's. Initially, I tried to discern the argument Serres was present- ing, and the flow of his language and the train of his thought seemed utterly opaque-especially given the limitations of my French. But once I listened with a more subconscious, holistic form of attention, his city began to take shape before me as an abstract structure with the intricately filigreed texture of a fractal. In retrospect, after the talk, and then later in reading the version of the talk distilled into prose, it was hard to retrace the connection between the original words and this elusive im- pression they formed in the mind's eye.

15. This insight is not a "discovery" of chaos theory, however. As Mandelbrot (1983) points out, Lewis Fry Richardson actually described the self-similarity of eddies linked by a cascade in turbulent flow in a 1926 paper.

16. The phrase, which appears on the back cover of Genese, is cited and explored by Assad in depth. Assad even sounds like a combination of Olson and Melville when she characterizes the trope of genesis/chaos as "that tumultuous chaos that is the nurturing, primal plasma of stochastic moments of invention" (279).

17. For a detailed examination of this trope in Serres, see Assad (1991). 18. Serres has voiced the impact that reading Mandelbrot has had on his work in

several places. 19. An instance of this sort of convergence between technological, scientific, and

spiritual interests from a scientist is Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, in which Kauffman expresses "the hope that what some are calling the new sciences of complexity may help us find anew our place in the universe, that through this new science, we may recover our sense of worth, our sense of the sacred." More than new scientific knowledge, these scientific ideas ostensibly are to provide "a new way to think about origins, evolution, and the profound naturalness of life and its myriad patterns of unfolding" (Kauffman, 4-5). The intriguing aspect of Kauffman's rhetoric is the extent to which it is inflected through capitalism-economics and the flows of capital are constant illustrative ex- amples of the "laws" Kauffman evokes-and technology-simulations in virtual space are the basis from which several of Kauffman's laws derive.

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Documents

Ecology and Topology in Michel Serres