The Theatre of Measurement: Michel Serres

Introduction

The philosopher and historian of science, Michel Serres, has an established reputation within several fields. Across the humanities, Serres is known as the author of critical studies which situate authors such as Emile Zola, Jules Verne or La Fontaine in relation to a broader cultural and scientific field. His audacious claim that the arts prefigure science, or rather that the work of art may in some sense translate between cultural problematics and scientific formalizations has helped to renew an entire field of studies in ‘Literature and Science’ (see in particular the journal Configurations). Conversely, in Science and Technology Studies (STS), Serres’ notion of translation is recognised as one of wellsprings of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). As such, his work has served as an essential resource for theorists looking to resituate science as part of the hybrid networks which cut across the division between politics and nature. Finally, within the heterogeneous literature on Information Systems, Serres is recognized as offering a distinctive account of information and communication and of the globalization of ‘message bearing systems’. His beautifully illustrated text Angels: A Modern Myth stands alongside contemporary work by Pierre Levy and Geoffrey Bowker.

What then of organization theory? In recent years a steady stream of ‘French thinkers’ such as Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida and Deleuze have all been co-opted into the field, sometimes under the overly broad rubric of ‘the postmodern’, but more usually as touchstones which enable a speaking in the name of ‘critique’ (see the adroit summary by Jones, 2004 on the case of the reception of Derrida). According to Sørensen (in this volume), Serres is next in line. That remains to be seen. But what is clear is that the co-option of Serres presents particular challenges. Whilst the Foucauldian or Deleuzian oeuvre defies ready summary, there are at least clear points of division and routinely established categories in the work with which to engage, along with a burgeoning secondary literature. The Serresian oeuvre, by contrast, varies wildly in terms of project, technique, style, method and content. What to make of a writer who authorizes himself to veer between topics as diverse as the Diogenes’ encounter with Alexander the Great, the Columbia space shuttle disaster, the origins of geometry, the operation of Charles de Gaulle airport, rats meals, the foundation of Rome, and the work of Hergé (creator of Tin Tin)? A writer whose best known work in English resembles a coffee-table book and whose recent work in France includes starring in a series of television advertisements for a telecom company?

William Paulson, responsible for some of the English translations of Serres’ work, and one of his most astute Anglophone commentators, sums up the difficulty of the reception of Serres in the following way (albeit within the English literature graduate school model):

A given text by Serres can appear to be endowed with such a radical specificity, a narrowed and focussed ambition, that it is difficult to see what – if anything – could be extracted and put into general circulation. Detachment (Serres, 1989), for example, consists of four meditative essays that read almost as mininovellas, organized under the headings ‘Farmer’, ‘Sailor’, ‘Wanderer’, ‘Friar’, which encompass questions of history, epistemology, cartography and ‘objectivity’. There is certainly nothing like a ‘model’ to be found here, as that term is usually understood. Nor is there anything that conforms especially to expected notions of ‘method’ (but note Serres’ fierce rejection of such a charge in his conversations with Bruno Latour, 1995). Much as one might be carried away with the seductive power of the homologies, analogies and unexpected, almost fantastical juxtapositions that Serres works through (here, rats steal from the farmer's table, and over there, the receiver extracts a surplus from the sender's message), it is difficult to know just what to do with Serres when the cover closes back on the book.

My aim then in this chapter is not to construct preferred readings or strategies that make Serres ‘relevant’ for the thinking of organization, nor to provide a comprehensive overview of his work (see, however, attempts by Abbas, 2005; Assad, 1999; Brown, 2002, 2004; Latour, 1987; Serres and Latour, 1995). Rather I will demonstrate, through a reading of a single piece by Serres, how some of the lines of thought developed in that text are necessarily entangled with and refracted through some of Serres’ major works.

General background

Before this, some brief background. Michel Serres is author of over thirty books, an erratic selection of which has been translated into English (I will make reference principally to translated work). He is nominally counted as a philosopher of science, but has worked for the major part of his career in departments of history and of literature, in North America as well as France. Serres was trained under the great French epistemologist Gaston Bachelard, under whom he completed a doctorate on Leibniz. At first glance, Serres’ early work, as represented in the Hermes series, might be mistaken as operating within orthodox history of ideas. Hermes I: La Communication, for instance, is built around linked essays on mathematics, communication theory and classical sources such as Descartes. In these texts, however, Serres demonstrates a complete disregard for existing epistemic demarcations. He refuses both established demarcations, notably that of ‘scientificity’ and ‘non-science’, and the infamous ‘breaks’ or ‘ruptures’ in the progress of knowledge that characterize the Bachelard approach. The Hermes texts are primarily explorations of a complex cartography of knowledge, where the formal and the informal, the scientific and the cultural become intertwined.

In subsequent work, Serres shifts away from critical interrogation of canonical texts towards a more open, and often highly stylized, exploration of problematics that subtend both the human and the exact sciences. Rome (Serres, 1991), for instance, interrogates the notion of ‘foundation’ as it appears in Livy's classical description of the founding of the Imperial City. Serres approach is to subject Livy's account to the experimental application of a series of concepts that are marked by biology and physics (notably complexity science). Thus Serres treats founding as an operation performed on a ‘multiplicity’ that exists between several threshold states ('white’ and ‘black’). He seeks the criterion which will denote passages between these states and, moreover, analyses the extent to which these transformations may be seen as reversible or not. Yet despite this apparent subjection of the historical to what appears to be an explanatory grid with aspirations of scientificity, Serres’ espoused intention is to contribute to a distinctly anthropological question: what is social order and how is it rendered durable? His approach remains consistent with the earlier Hermes texts – read culture ‘scientifically’ and read science ‘culturally’.

This formula, which amounts to a demand continuously to cross disciplinary and epistemic faultlines, has been pushed yet further in Serres’ work of the past fifteen years. Troubadour of Knowledge (Serres, 1997), for instance, is loosely organized around the relationship of pedagogy to ‘wisdom’ in cultures where the latter is seen as the stakes in an increasingly polarised split between technology and myth. In a sparsely structured text which tends towards the aphoristic, Serres attempts to perform ‘instruction’ as a matter of taking direction from every point of the epistemic compass, with rather mixed results. More ambitious still is Angels: A Modern Myth (Serres, 1995a), which proposes to analyse the globalization of information communication technologies by pushing the metaphor of the angelic messenger to its very limits. Through a mixture of sumptuously presented visual images framed with gnomic statements, themselves interleaved with an invented dialogue between two characters working at Charles de Gaulle airport, Serres proposes a formative ‘philosophy of prepositions’ where mediation and connection rather than substantives dominate.

Serres is currently one of the forty ‘les immortels’ of the Academie Francaise. His writing – which now currently spans 1968 to 2004 – shows little sign of diminishing in output. It is perhaps fair to say that in France, despite coming from the tail end of the generation of thinkers that includes Derrida and Deleuze (Serres worked for a time with Foucault at Clermont-Ferrand), Serres has never really acquired the status of his peers, although a book of dialogues with Bruno Latour published in the early 1990s went some way towards a public explication of his work. Amongst the Anglophone world, both the delay and curiosity in choice of works in translation has not really helped to establish Serres as a name. And as Paulson succinctly puts it ‘the real problem with the translations is that they are usually not reviewed in the most visible or influential publications, and they are not exactly flying out of the bookstores’ (2000: 215).

A history of scientific thought

The piece which will serve as the basis of discussion is drawn from a collection edited by Serres in 1989 (Serres, 1995b). The publication is drawn from an ambitious project, aiming at nothing less than restoration of the history of science as a discipline to a general readership. The ambition is to ‘restore depth’ to the modern world, by demonstrating how the colossal power of modern technics is co-extensive with what it is that we think we know about the development of human society. In this respect, what is offered is a history of science and technology. The version of history that is performed, however, is one that is at odds with the usual historiography of the scientific. Typically, this offers a positive definition of ‘scientificity’ and then proceeds to show how this criterion has been progressively met through the gradual development and elaboration of science from its precursors in the ancient world to its full blossoming in the post-Enlightenment West. Serres and his collaborators, by contrast, wish to restore a provisional and contingent character to science:

The difference in approach could not be starker from that of Bachelard. Science proceeds not by breaks or by wholesale revisions in its fundamental conceptual and phenomenological base (that is ‘paradigm’), but rather through the contingent unravelling of a tangled weave of pathways and vectors that often turn back on themselves. Moreover, science is not thinkable outside of the collectives and the technologies that provide its proper milieu. But if this is so, then how is it possible to conceive of any continuity? Or, put more simply, what are the points that provide the necessary hooks for a history? In language that echoes the latter Foucault, Serres describes these ‘hooks’ as the problematics which afford choice and selection:

The chapters of the collection are then focussed on the points of intersection, or knots, where heterogeneous currents of thought are brought together and rendered fit for judgement. Sometimes these knots are precisely dated, at other times this dating is merely prototypical, and designed purely to establish a field of relative intensities (as is the case, notoriously, in Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus). In either case, the work of analysis involves restoring the radical specificity and contingency to the problem that is effaced when science is considered merely as the progressive elaboration of concept and method.

Serres’ principal contribution to the project is an exploration of the origins of geometry in Greece. This rather unpromising topic is actually one to which Serres has turned on numerous occasions, most notably in Les origines de la géométrie (Serres, 1993). Serres begins with a puzzle. The ancient Greek world exists for us only in the form of the fragments and contested versions that make up the modern historical method. But Greek geometry is seemingly preserved in an immediate and tangible way. Or as Serres puts it:

The apparent durability of Greek geometry sets up several problems. If geometry is preserved in this fashion, does this not indicate that it stands outside of the historical, properly speaking? And if this is so, then what hope can there be for a history of science, if a given body of knowledge is taken to transcend the conditions of its own emergence? Serres’ response is to invert the problem. If geometry overcomes history then this represents a ‘triumph’ by ‘the Greeks’ as a collective. We may then ask, in a properly historical fashion, what led this collective to appeal to the transcendent, and the social and conceptual apparatus which made such a strategy possible. To do so we must begin with the concrete, rather than the abstract.

Gnomon

In a classic early essay Mathematics and Philosophy: What Thales Saw… Serres (1982a) retells the fable of the philosopher who measured the height of the great pyramids. Thales, the fragile mortal, stands before the immortal and vast stone monuments. He is equipped solely with a peg sunk into the sand. As the sun sets, the shadows cast by pyramid and peg create two corresponding isosceles triangles, which can be measured and compared using basic geometric principles. Here truly is the ‘Greek miracle’ – one man dominates a mighty pyramid. In this ‘theatre of measurement’ invented through the simple act of placing a peg in the sand, it is as though everything changed place. The weak human overcomes ancient hewn stone, the mobile sun produces immobile geometric forms, a third space of knowledge emerges on the sand enveloping both philosopher and pyramid.

The Thales fable contains many of the elements that Serres denotes using the term translation. There is an interaction or communication between two diverse partners (Thales, Pyramid) which involves a switching or exchanging of properties (weak/strong, mortal/durable). This exchange occurs in a ‘third space’ that is opened up between the two where a new means of determination or of finding settlements is produced (the geometry of shadows cast). The space itself is opened up by something which mediates or interrupts the original relationship (in this case, the peg that ‘borrows’ the suns rays). This basic schema is repeated throughout nearly all of Serres’ work (and was adopted by Michel Callon (1980) in one of the original formulations of Actor-Network Theory).

To study ‘what Thales saw’ in terms of translation means beginning from the seemingly least important element in the fable – the peg pinned in the ground. Serres similarly begins his questioning of Greek geometry by describing a mundane instrument inherited from the Babylonians known as ‘Gnomon’. A gnomon is a stationary shaft mounted on a plinth, on which various inscriptions are made. The shaft casts shadows at varying angles and lengths according to the sun's position overhead. We would then assume that the mounted gnomon is a sundial, used for establishing a chronographic division of the day. Serres argues, however, that there is no need for such a device in a social order already highly sensitive to natural cycles against which human activities are coordinated. The gnomon was instead used, Serres claims, as a ‘instrument of scientific research in its own right, demonstrating a model of the world, giving the length of shadows at midday on the longest and shortest days, and indicating the equinoxes, solstices and latitude of place, for example. It was more of an observatory than a clock’ (1995c: 9).

If the gnomon really was an observatory, it functioned very differently from our modern conceptions of such a device. The telescope, Serres notes, clearly defines a space for the human observer at the eyepiece. The subject is afforded a space of ‘contemplating, observing, calculating, arranging the planets’ (1995c: 80), which simultaneously sets up the heavens as a space to be observed and on which order will be projected. But the gnomon functions differently. It does not define a space for the human subject in this clear way, since one can read the gnomon from various positions. Moreover, for the Greeks, it was the gnomon itself rather than the subject which ‘knew, discerned, distinguished, intercepted the light from the Sun, left lines on the sand as if it were writing on a blank page and, yes, understood’ (1995c: 80). The gnomon projects the heavens down onto the sand – it makes inscriptions. It is as though the constellations were ‘writing themselves’ through the mediation of the gnomon. This is a scene which is, Serres claims, entirely outside of the Cartesian space of representation, and hence, to us moderns, somewhat inexplicable.

The theme of nature ‘writing itself’ recurs through much of Serres’ latter work (see Brown, 2003). In The Natural Contract, for instance, Serres (1995d) aims to recover a notion of the Earth as a ‘global subject’ that produces marks which deserve to be treated as responses to the innumerable ‘contracts’ that human affairs form with nature. We assume that the only contracts, and the only marks, which matter are those produced by humans as communicative social acts. But such contracts are, Serres notes, typically shored up by an appeal to nature as a grounding space outside of human collectivity, whose relevance is seen purely in terms of its utility as a resource in social governance. Yet when that external space becomes so encroached and exhausted by the ‘weight’ of the collective human mass upon it, we must, Serres argues, find other ways of reading those marks.

The analysis of the gnomon provides the start of the story that will culminate in The Natural Contract. The inscriptions which the gnomon makes on the sand remain the mysterious and inaccessible writing of a world where subject and object are not cleaved asunder:

Human and gnomon are interchangeable. Either one may stand in such a way as to allow the world to write itself as cast shadows. It is the inversion of this scene, where the writing is seen as the merely the trailing edge of the projection of human knowing onto the world as observed and ordered, that characterises, for Serres, the ‘modern attitude’. Greek geometry is then caught between these modalities of inscription.

Machine, intelligence, table

The notion that the gnomon itself ‘knows’, ‘discerns’ or ‘judges’ may sound an instance of pure anthropomorphism. Likewise, when Actor-Network Theorists such as Callon and Latour demand that ‘things’ (ie, artefacts, objects, natural kinds) be accorded a form of rights which recognises them as participating agents in human affairs (see in particular Latour, 1993; 2004, and the discussion by Harris, in this volume), it is difficult to see this claim as anything but entirely fanciful. By demonstrating, however, both the crucial role of mediators, such as gnomon, in the constitution of knowledge, and the fundamental instability of the positions of ‘observer’ and ‘observed’ (or ‘sender’/‘receiver’; ‘subject’/‘object’), Serres begins to make a sound case for suspending the traditional division between human and artefact.

The sort of judgement and discernment performed by the gnomon is automatic. That is to say that it produces inscriptions in a continuous and immediate fashion without need of any particular observer or user. In this sense the gnomon is a ‘machine’. But it is nevertheless, Serres claims, endowed with a form of intelligence, albeit of a special sort: ‘In the literal sense, the gnomon is intelligent because it puts together situations chosen amongst thousands of others, therefore it discerns and understands. A passive receiver, it sees the light and then actively traces the fringe of the shadow on the page while theoretically showing the model of the sky’ (1995c: 86).

Conceptualized in this way, intelligence amounts to a twin process of selecting and redistributing. This formulation betrays Serres’ surprising reliance on a classical form of information theory. With the exception perhaps of the work of Robert Cooper (see Spoelstra, in this volume), there are few contemporary theorists who would seek to draw much from the thoroughly debased edifice of knowledge that information theory represents. Yet Serres manages to find a rich stockpile of provocative allegories and tools for thinking within this edifice. For example, The Parasite (Serres, 1982b), takes up an implication, developed by Henri Atlan (1974), of the relative difference in the discernment of signal against noise that exists between sender and receiver. The sender transmits a ‘signal’ which differentiates itself against background ‘noise’. But the receiver is not necessarily committed to this differentiation. It may be that some of what has been relegated to the position of noise has some informational value. The receiver then makes the cut (ie, discerns, distributes) between signal and noise in their own fashion. Serres then takes the basic premise, and extends it into a generalized model of relations, where each placeholder selects and discerns from the mix of signal and noise they receive, before transmitting onwards their own particular signal, fashioned against what they take to be noise. And so on. In the process doubtless there is something preserved through the successive communicative acts, but it is transformed as it is repeatedly ‘cut’ (ie, mixed, interspersed) with noise on each occasion.

The gnomon is then a selector, a distributor, a means of making cuts, in the sense of both divisions and mixtures. Serres refers to it as an artefact that does not depend on human intervention – the gnomon produces its cuts automatically. The inscriptions it produces might then be recorded in the form of tables, which render durable the patterns drawn on the sand. These tables then establish ratios and progressive series. The gnomon becomes the basis for a geometric arithmetic based on the repeated application of established procedures. The Greeks then also named ‘gnomon’ that device we now call a ‘set square’. This tool enables progressive bands of squares formed at the right angle. For the Greeks, it also served as a tool for calculating the odd numbers required to construct a series of successive square numbers. In all three cases the gnomon functions automatically, as machine for generating inscriptions.

Serres summarizes this development of the gnomon as giving rise to a form of knowledge that is ‘algorithmic’. The automatic knowledge of the gnomon is both given in advance of the deliberations of any subject (it is to be found already in the table, or given by the series) and moreover acts as a form of ‘memory’. As Serres puts it – ‘for us, knowing consists of putting ourselves into a form similar to what we know. The object we construct, we create in a fashion which is similar to certain things of the world, ultimately our guides’ (1995c: 96). The gnomon is then an automatic generator of forms, which, through the repeated application of the machine, extend into infinite repeating series and patterns. The world orders itself through the gnomon, and that which we call ‘knowledge’ consists of ordering ourselves in line with what is granted in the process. Elsewhere Serres (1987) names these machines as ‘statues’ – the points around which a closed system of forms can be gathered up and restarted, that part of the system which seems to lend an impetus and direction, but does itself not move.

Meno

Thus far we have been following the development of one aspect of Greek geometry – the algorithmic calculation of ratio and series. But what of the other aspect of knowledge that the Greeks broadly called geometric – demonstration and deduction? Serres articulates the differences between these two forms of geometric knowledge through a reading of the Meno dialogue in Plato. Ostensibly, the Meno dialogue concerns Socrates’ assertion that what is called ‘learning’ is reducible to the recollection of transcendental forms which are already given. Socrates makes his case by instructing a slave boy to draw a square on the sand, and then asks him to double the area of the square. The boy initially fails, but through structured reflection enacted in concert with Socrates eventually manages to approximate an answer.

For Serres, this dialogue is a clash between older and newly emerging versions of Greek geometry. The boy approaches the task using the older knowledge, that which is authorized by the gnomon – ‘in those days people trusted the gnomon, whose job it was to know. The new school had lost that knowledge, which had become contemptible and only fit for slaves. And the young man knows it, says it and represents it’ (1995c: 103). The older knowledge, based on ratios, suggests that multiplying the lengths of the square will be sufficient to double the area. Such would be the procedure of applying a set square. But this procedure proves fruitless – the boy overestimates, firstly wildly, then modestly. This is of course the point of the demonstration, since ‘Socrates is cheating, he knows he will not find the exact length’ (p. 105). He is cheating because the puzzle cannot be solved by drawing lines on the sand and applying the algorithmic principles of whole numbers. The puzzle can only be tackled through knowledge of the diagonal and a new arithmetic base in irrational numbers and integers. This new knowledge cannot be laid out in the sand, like the inscriptions of the gnomon, it can only be performed in an abstract third space that is beyond that of the immediate:

The point then of the dialogue is, Serres claims, to establish that henceforth discernment and understanding, previously given over to the gnomon, can now only be performed through a relation to another space, that of ideal figures and pure geometric forms (such as the diagonal), to which access is limited and tightly controlled. Only he or she who is authorized to speak on behalf this space may be trusted to adequately exercise judgement. If the fable of Thales produces the third space of the peg, the gnomon, which thenceforth takes charge of knowledge in an automatic fashion, here we see a second form of translation, where the gnomon itself is placed in relation to a new ‘third space’, but this time one which is placed outside of the sensory realm, which constitutes a very definite space for the thinking subject. For unlike the gnomon, which requires no subject to inscribe the world on the sand, this new space requires the mediation of he or she who can enact formal demonstrative procedures to translate the abstract back into the concrete. It requires a Socrates who can subtly ‘cheat’ a boy who he demands make insoluble marks on the sand before them (and in this do we not see here the final humiliation of the gnomon before the ‘new knowledge’, since Socrates is now its avowed master).

The Meno dialogue also makes clear that choices between various geometric frameworks are not simply technical choices. They are also human choices, which are, in essence, matters related to the control and governance of social relations. Socrates does not merely cheat, he makes a power play. Serres then imagines a genealogy of Greek geometry, which, very roughly, takes the following form.

First, we have the fable of Thales, the realization that the single, fragile human can dominate the impersonal mass of the world. From the third space which arises as a result, we have the birth of arithmetic and of the use of whole numbers as a means of creating inscriptions on the natural world, which can then be projected back on the human collective (in The Natural Contract Serres offers the example of the harpedonaptai who were tasked with applying geometric principles to redistribute the Nile floodland to the populace). Second, we have the emergence of another set of geometric principles, which, whilst they promise to thematise ‘equality’, have the result of constructing a new third space of the ideal which is entirely outside of human relations, and which can only be made accessible through the demonstrative/deductive method.

But something happens as a consequence, something which is quite unforeseen. The creation of the ideal space means that human affairs can now only be realised in relation to something outside of themselves. This is something new. Unlike the gnomon, a device by means of which nature writes itself, this space demands a collective subject who may interrogate its properties. This, Serres claims, is the birth of science – the emergence of a community who take themselves as such by virtue of their relation to a space which is outside of their own collective bonds:

Yes, the group becomes a thing, in the sense that social divisions now reflect the extent to which access to this space outside of human affairs is granted. What we call science is now possible. And this happens through the shifting of a problematic which took as its object social relations to a new object of the relation between humans and this new space, which hitherto will be entangled with the question of ‘nature’ – ‘scientists believe in the existence of the outside world as the monk believed in God: neither can prove it, but they cannot exercise their faith or their science without this fundamental 1995c: 119).

Conclusion

To what extent then is Michel Serres a theorist of organizations? In the proper sense, not at all. Serres has no interest in how organizations are structured, in their emergence, nor in their broader place in the social order. In contrast to Foucault, he has resisted any desire to interrogate the specific forms in which governance is forged and performed. There is very little in his work that will interest a researcher who is seeking a ready made framework for performing either theoretical or empirical studies of organizational life. You have to read Serres on your own time. He is extracurricular.

So why bother? Because, I think, of his ability to display that the neat categories in which we place questions of organizing are often ill founded. His dictum of thinking science culturally and culture scientifically neatly problematizes what it means to do social science, which can so easily descend into a parody of both science and culture, desperately in search of its own auto-authorisation (which may seem to come, does it not, through uttering the proper name of the theorist).

The sorts of things that Serres worries about – the problem of founding social relations in something other than themselves; what happens when communication goes astray; the tension between those things that hold a system together and those things that crack open a system to its outside; what to do, and how to understand, power and violence – all these strike me as central to what the study of organizations ought to concern itself with. Following Serres’ brilliant, if complex and tortuous, responses is certainly instructive.

One could, of course, if so minded, simply treat Serres as a field which may be mined for a set of concepts and ideas which can be put to work elsewhere. This is perfectly possible. No-one will tell you off, few will even find you out, if you sneak a concept such as ‘translation’, ‘substitution’, ‘blankness’ or ‘quasi-object’. I have done so myself. But, what, ultimately, Serres offers is an exemplary model for how to think across borderlines, how to pursue a problem through the many inevitable transformations that it succumbs to. To read any text of Serres is to come away feeling the power of allusion, of the oblique, of the diagonal. Ultimately, Serres demonstrates what it means to do the work of translation, to accept the wildest of juxtapositions as the necessary conditions of academic labour. Are these texts gnomon? Or demonstration? Engage, translate, decide.