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Vera Bühlmann in this chapter inhabits Serres’s position on philosophy for architecture, suggesting that chance and necessity are not in conflict as necessity originates in chance and chance comprehends necessity. Matter in its quantum physical character is controlled by computational and chance bound calculation, but how can knowledge be new if it is rule-based. Serres’s exodic knowledge is capitalised in the case of this chapter as a way of looking at elements as coded, discretised and distributed while unaccountable and inaccessible, allowing building as an autonomous entity to be a function of rarity that is compatibility with the totality of economic and political power without dominating or being harnessed by them. Paris Hermitage project by Pa.La.Ce studio is the vehicle to discuss materiality, as this is initiated in the field of recent architectural theory, that incorporates code and a formality that is computational.

Michel Serres seeks to elaborate an account of the human that accommodates both determinate qualities (like Badiou and Meillassoux) and de-differentiation (like Malabou). His aim is to marry singularity and determinacy with genericity and plurality, yielding neither an undifferentiated and abstract notion of humanity nor a diversity of individuals with nothing in common. Humanity is best understood, for Serres, as part of the ‘Great Story’ (Grand Récit) of the universe, a story not only about, but also told by, the natural world. The combination of Serres’s Great Story and his introduction of the two figures of multi-coloured Harlequin and all-white Pierrot gives him a multi-modal account of humanity (capacities plus narrative), and this makes the figure of the human that emerges from his work richer, as well as more situated in its landscape and its history, than the one we find in the accounts considered in chapters 1-4. There is, however, a danger that Serres’s Great Story becomes a ‘host story’ for his account of the human, forcing all humans into a single narrative mould in the same way that a host capacity or a host substance routes all discourse about the human through one single characteristic or quality.

This chapter addresses the differences between information theory and autopoietic theory since neither of these discursive traditions can be reduced to the other, nor be merged as one. The term noise particularly stands out amongst the theories derived from information theory for its investigative potency and intellectual glamour, as seen through Michael Serres’ work. The concept of noise is a central point within postmodernist scientific and cultural paradigms, denoting the unpredictable development of unforeseen orderings. Furthermore, information theory has redefined communication as a problem of transmission. It is also a primary concept in Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory, which deems communication as the sole and self-produced product of the operations of social autopoiesis.

This chapter urges hermeneutics to take a Ricoeurian “detour” to engage the hard sciences, realism, and materialism. Such a detour is of particular importance and significance in the treatment of subjects such as the environment, the body, and questions of matter. It further suggests that the work of Michel Serres on “the hard” and “the soft” could be a useful landmark on such a detour. Serres provides a framework for taking seriously both a commitment to realism and the inescapability of the hermeneutic circle, as well as offering criticisms of thinking that, through zealous fidelity to either the hard (matter, the given) or the soft (interpretation, language), becomes blind to alternatives.

This introductory chapter presents an approach for analysing mercantile treatises and early English drama based on the work of Michel Serres and Bruno Latour. It compares this approach to new economic criticism, new historicism, and cognitive approaches to theatre. It summarises the book's argument that seventeenth-century mercantile treatises aspired to be transparent windows onto a world of objective truth, whereas plays showed totalising representations of economic activity to be self-evidently discursive constructs. Plays drew attention to the tension between framing and overflowing, between the aspects of the world internalised by particular representation of commerce and those aspects that appear as externalities. The author terms the array of techniques by which playwrights could use the stage to create and interrogate models of commercial activity in its systemic totality a ‘mercantile dramaturgy.’

The current ecological debate in France may be summarized by the contrast between philosophers Michel Serres and Luc Ferry. Serres condemns the war on nature that modern humans, desiring in the Cartesian tradition to “master and possess” nature, seem to be waging. He aspires to a “natural contract” between humans and nature, which would entail a symbiotic relationship between the parties. Ferry accuses Serres of being antihumanist—a radical, deep ecologist—and mocks the very idea of a natural contract. While Serres’s world view is ecocentric, placing humans on the same plane as the rest of nature, which should possess legal dignity, Ferry embraces an anthropocentric world view, in which humans are clearly separate from and superior to the rest of nature. Bruno Latour, a student of Serres, accuses Ferry of being mired in Kantian modernism.

It has been the central concern of this book to interrogate the traditional but deeply problematical separation of the practices of science from the rest of culture. While the works examined are both literary and scientific in nature, it has been important to this study to demonstrate how these categories are themselves products of a highly successful series of disciplinary strategies dedicated to establishing the division between science and culture, or between science and literature, or between nature and art. The concluding chapter offers a brief review of the territory covered in the book. At the same time, invoking Michel Serres' notion of archaism and “crumpled time,” it maps out the very general outlines for future work in the field of early modern studies that might continue and extend the insights represented by the many critics working toward a new understanding of the early modern cultures of science.

This chapter aims at clarifying some fundamental concepts of Bruno Latour’s philosophical sociology. It shows that the concept of “actor,” or “actant,” was derived from the semiology of Algirdas Julien Greimas. In addition, it depicts Latour’s gradual shift from the semiological to a pragmatist notion of “actors.” This shift occurs in Latour’s dialogue with Michel Serres and Isabelle Stengers that he increasingly engages in in the late 1980s.

Exploring the limitations of current scholarly discourse on the presence of Lucretius in literature of Elizabethan England, Adam Rzepka, in his paper “Discourse ex nihilo: Epicurus and Lucretius in sixteenth-century England,” confronts the notion that the De Rerum Natura figures the poetics of its own subsequent transmission. Drawing upon Michel Serres and Jacques Lezra, who have both used Lucretian terms (swerve, eventum [“accident”]) to figure discourse, he urges the need for a more mobile, complex model of discursive interaction during the Elizabethan period, which heretofore has presented Lucretian influence as a sudden, ex nihilo (and therefore highly un-Lucretian) occurrence.

The Introduction offers an overview of the history of science as it impacts on the study of early modern literature and culture. This history has two general phases. The first begins in the 1930s and lasts into the 1980s and is dedicated to demonstrating the influence of science on literary texts. The second phase emerges in the 1980s and 1990s and develops in response to a certain revolution in science studies, a term meant to designate the multidisciplinary study of science as both a socially and a historically embedded set of practices and habits of thought. This revolution is also therefore part of the story this chapter tells about early modernity, science, and literary culture. The most significant consequence of the new science and literature criticism is its understanding of the ways in which both the scientific and the literary are equally (though differently) engaged in the knowledge production.

Drawing on Serres’ concept of the parasite and its point of departure in the history of linguistics and mathematical theory of communication, the chapter develops a concept of Cultural Techniques as a filtering operation which produces the distinction between sign and signal. In three case studies, one about the discovery and the first printed edition of the Res Gestae of Augustus in the sixteenth century, another about Franz Kafka’s famous “Pontus letter” to Felice Bauer, and a third about a radio play by Max Bense which starts with computer generated language on the basis of transition probabilities or Markov chains, it is demonstrated how in typographical, analog, and digital media the encoding of disruption (or noise) becomes constitutive for the idea that texts, telephones, or radio are media of communication. The methodological gain derived from using the cultural techniques approach is most apparent when the ontological distinction between symbols (as defined by logic) and signals (as defined by communications engineering) is replaced by the practical problem of distinguishing between them.

Many of Stevens’s most important poems feature birds, and specifically the phenomenon of the poet hearing birds’ songs. The bird/bard tradition is, of course, a long one in the poetic canon. Both bird and bard sing, and both carry messages from another domain, either above or below the mundane world of human affairs. In Stevens’s poetry, however, the connection between bird and bard is presented as anything but “natural,” as the bird poems relentlessly foreground the performativity and rhetoricity of the poet’s reaction to hearing birds’ songs and his speculation about its meaning. Far from mitigating against an ecopoetic reading of the poems, however, this feature in fact secures it. Drawing on Diane Ackerman’s book The Genius of Birds and Jacques Derrida’s critique of “responding” versus merely “reacting” as the hallmark of the human’s difference from the animal, this chapter shows that performativity, iterability, and a complicated—and finally undecidable—co-implication of responding and reacting, improvisation and instinct, are constitutive of birds’ songs in the current ornithological understanding. Here as in earlier chapters, form provides the ecologically shared conditions of possibility for meaning for both humans and animals, linking the human to the non-human world in systematic, not representational, ways.

This chapter develops an ontology of sound and argues that sound art plays a crucial role in manifesting this ontology. Drawing from G.W. Leibniz, Michel Serres, and Gilles Deleuze, and examining work by sonic artists Éliane Radigue, Jacob Kirkegaard, Francisco López, Annea Lockwood, Joan La Barbara, and others, the chapter argues that the sonic flux has two dimensions: an intensive dimension (“noise”) and an actual dimension in which this intensive continuum is articulated (for example, by speech and music). The richest works of sound art, the chapter suggests, are unique among audible phenomena in that they disclose the intensive dimension of sound and its processes of actualization.

This chapter begins by outlining some common properties of channels, infrastructure, and institutions. It connects and critiques the assumptions and interventions of three influential intellectual traditions: cybernetics (via Claude Shannon), linguistics and anthropology (via Roman Jakobson), and actor-network theory (via Michel Serres). By developing the relation between Serres’s notion of the parasite and Peirce’s notion of thirdness, it theorizes the role of those creatures who live in and off infrastructure: not just enemies, parasites, and noise, but also pirates, trolls, and internet service providers. And by extending Jakobson’s account of duplex categories (shifters, proper names, meta-language, reported speech) from codes to channels, it theorizes four reflexive modes of circulation any network may involve: self-channeling channels, source-dependent channels, signer-directed signers, and channel-directed signers. The conclusion returns to the notion of enclosure, showing the ways that networks are simultaneously a condition for, and a target of, knowledge, power, and profit.

The Central district in Hong Kong is a scene of wealth and prosperity, a glamorous picture of the vivacious city and those who live within it. Against this overwhelming cityscape, a striking transformation takes place every Sunday. Picnic rugs and vibrant dresses bring colour to the usual sea of dark suits of the week; while music and lively banter replace the dull march of heels on marbled surfaces. Underneath the imposing government and office towers, thousands of domestic workers from the Philippines congregate on their day off. Beneath the arches of Norman Foster’s HSBC building, on the overhead walkways that connect office towers, Statue Square and Chater garden, passageways become destinations. This chapter first traces the various geographies of Little Manila, bringing the lenses to examine the activities, economies and exchanges that take place through Michel de Certeau’s work on The Practice of Everyday Life. The second section looks at the Filipino population and its relation to Hong Kong, engaging with Michel Serres’ work on The Parasite as a new theoretical tool that could offer an alternative perspective of the fluid relations between places, people and relationships at different junctures.

Developing Didier Anzieu's account of the skin as a palimpsest that preserves traces of experience inscribed on its surface, this chapter reads the ‘palimpsestuous’ quality of Michael Ondaatje's work. Discussing his novels In The Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, it reads the co-implication of the body and the text as a means of mapping aesthetic movement and form. The chapter argues that in disrupting the conventions of the realist novel, Ondaatje presents a textual skin that is both mobile and mutable. Comparing this skin to Michel Serres's discussion of the syrrhèse or a cloud of dust, it suggests that Ondaatje's ‘tactile poetics’ demand a different mode of reading. Rather than focusing on the motif of inscription in Ondaatje's work, this chapter employs Jean-Luc Nancy's theory of exscription in order to interrogate the traces that are ‘inscribed-outside’ the text. Reading the skin-effects of Ondaatje's work, it demonstrates that language is subject to its own expeausition.

The theory of evolution marks a recent moment in the long history of narratives of bodily metamorphosis, a modern moment when scientific discourse presented new and persuasive explanations for divergences in the forms of living beings. In the mid-twentieth century, the discourse of cybernetics emerged to explore the increasingly complex interface of technological and biological systems. Philosopher of science Michel Serres and sociologist of science and technology Bruno Latour's work is inspired by neocybernetics. Due to the connection to neocybernetics discourse, Latour informs his important polemics against philosophies that divide beings up and purify nature and society from one another. Discourse hybridity in network and self-referential closure can work together in a conceived neocybernetics because they stem from the same classical cybernetic sources. Latour's concepts describe a neocybernetic vision of the necessary hybridity of symbiotic networks and system-environment couplings, and they describe equally well the daemonic landscapes of metamorphic narratives.

It is well known that the modern concept of rhythm has its origins in Presocratic Greek thought, but how exactly did Greek philosophers and poets before Plato understand this term? This chapter explores this question through a close analysis of work by Archilochus, Democritus, Pindar, Xenophon, Heraclitus, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. It then considers the ways in which Plato and then Aristotle all but indelibly altered the Greek concept of rhythm. Building on twentieth-century insights by Émile Benveniste, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Serres, the chapter argues that Presocratic accounts of rhythm present the concept primarily as form and give temporal considerations only secondary importance. Following Serres, the chapter defines rhythm as a “reversal or interruption of flow” that gives all matter its form. Turning to poetic accounts of rhythm, the chapter shows how this “form-giving reversal” is also linked to dispossession and a foundational (even metaphysical) ordering. The chapter concludes by arguing that Plato effectively arithmetized rhythm, redefining it explicitly as the “ordered movement” of bodies across space but also, more importantly, across quantifiable, discrete time.

This chapter links the essential parasitism of cold war systems to some general trends of 20^th century telecommunications (economically motivated service-oriented multi-media). Certain (existential) fictions of the second half of the century explore and instantiate the peculiar logic of the parasite. The chapter draws out the implications of an ethics grounded in the attempt to deal with this logic and questions where such attempts, and the desires that drive them, might lead. These ethical concerns are connected via technological analysis to the 1956 plan for a radio link (known as Backbone) running north and south through the UK, avoiding large towns and meant to provide a safe route for communications vital to the prosecution of a war. The conjunction of existentialist fiction with the cold war technology ties together a triad of puzzles of the era: communication, existence and the problem of other minds. But the problems have since shifted—the rational subject now comes into being belatedly as an interrupter, a parasite, displacing or replacing the previous parasite. The parasitical arrangement does not follow the formal order of subject and object but occurs intersubjectively, producing its subjects in the process and figuring a fundamental alteration in social relations.

This chapter asks what happens when we see the light that must withdraw and be invisible to make the clearing clear. As Michel Serres points out, the world of solid and stable objects requires well defined borders and limits to distinguish each object. A solid object occupies a distinct place, and this place is defined by the sharp borders that contain it. Whence, according to Serres, the “association of the distinct with the clear, the language of light with the language of borders.” The edges and borders that define distinct objects appear sharply only in a light—be it from the sun or the electric factory—that is bright enough to clear the fog or empty the air that would blur them.