More-than-human geographies: an encounter with Serres’ universality

Introduction

Although some recent interest has been sparked by the publication of further translated texts into English and a comprehensive monograph, much of the particularly later philosophy of Michel Serres remains largely unchartered outside France. ¹ Serres published over 60 books from 1968 up to the year of his death in 2019. He was a professor at the Paris-Sorbonne University, where he served as the Chair in the History of Science and was a visiting Professor at Stanford for 30 years. In 1990, he was elected to the prestigious Académie Française, but his background was very different from the largely middle-class academic elite in Paris. His father was a bargeman and, in his youth, Serres was involved in heavy manual labour. ² Serres remained deeply proud of his humble background, claiming that his first training came from working alongside ‘blacksmiths, saddlers, masons, agricultural workers and sailors’ and that he learnt more from them than reading books. He went on to study at a Naval Academy and became an officer in the Navy. Life at sea brought him close to the turbulence and dangers of the natural world which he incorporated into his philosophical thought and practice.

Although Philo suggests that Serres has received scant attention in geography, Serres’ thoughts on topological space and parasitical logic have been explored persuasively. ³ Martin and Secor engage with Serres’ conception of relational space beyond any sense of a ‘transcendent metric’. ⁴ Lury refers to Serres’ understanding that relations do not ‘rely on the mechanical or organic’. ⁵ In the investigation of biosecurity in relation to emerging infectious diseases, Hinchcliffe et al. use continuous ‘topological interplay’ to track ‘transactions and transformations that defy easily segmented spaces’. ⁶ Lezaun uses Serres’ figure of the parasite to shed light on the political logic of continuous bureaucratic expansion. ⁷ Philo has recently provided a careful and insightful account of Serres’ parasitical logic and prepositional encounters. ⁸ Above all, Whatmore engages fully with Serres’ work in her influential investigation of hybrid geographies. ⁹ However, all these studies have tended to overlook most of the 30 or so books that Serres has written since 2000 in which his thought branches out, developing his inclusive philosophy in diverse yet interconnected directions. For example, studies in geography tend to use topology as a different way of conceiving spaces relationally rather than in the context of his fundamental practice of doing philosophy. In his words, it is the ‘universal topological variety whose aspect guides my philosophy’. ¹⁰ At the same time, the inclusion of Serres often tends to be firmly anchored in what is revealed through his conversations with Latour some 25 years ago. ¹¹ Bingham and Thrift make the common assumption that Serres’ and Latour’s thought are closely aligned. ¹² Although Serres had some influence on the emergence of ANT, he always distanced himself from the concept and became dismissive of any use of ‘network’ as a spatial metaphor for describing the entanglement of human and nonhuman actors in the contemporary era. ¹³ Serres’ philosophy also has the reputation for being rather eccentric and challenging. Thrift says it is regarded as ‘idiosyncratic even in a culture that values idiosyncrasy!’ ¹⁴ With Latour in his sights, but with reference to Serres and Stenger as well, Castree’s view is that their ideas ‘cut little ice in the wider world or in much of academia outside the social sciences and humanities’. ¹⁵ It is my contention that, on the contrary, Serres’ imaginative and inventive thought becomes increasingly relevant and accessible inside and outside the academic world.

The aim of this article is to demonstrate that various important questions posed by more-than-human geographies can be explored innovatively and imaginatively by an encounter with Serres’ diverse work and disclose new trajectories of thought. I follow Whatmore’s adoption of the term ‘more-than-human’ rather than ‘posthuman’ as the former does not imply the end, but more the ongoing or even beginning of what it means to be human. ¹⁶ I begin by providing a platform for exploring the relevance of Serres work, tracing some pioneering and productive strands of more-than-human geographies. Secondly, a broad snapshot of creative encounters is explored through three exemplary investigations by Serres. In conclusion, I contrast accounts inside and outside geography that take direction from Indigenous and decolonial thought and practice through ideas of a ‘pluriverse’ with Serres’ growing explorations of a universal story of origins that offers a decentred humanism. I contend that Serres offers new spaces to think by his insistence on retaining ‘universal’ and ‘humanism’ in the face of the fundamental challenges to these terms offered by different formulations of more-than-human geographies.

More-than-human geographies

In this article it is impossible to do justice to the rich vein of work that relates in diverse ways to more-than-human-geographies. ¹⁷ One main thrust of these innovations is to explore radical ways to break down the binaries underpinning anthropocentric thought. Badmington gives examples such as ‘human/inhuman, self/other, natural/cultural, inside/outside, subject/object, us/them, here/there, active/passive and wild/tame’. ¹⁸ In tentatively dipping into the possibilities of ‘posthuman’ geography, Castree and Nash acknowledge that the confrontation with the ‘ontological purity’ of the human subject has been on-going in geography since the early 1990s. ¹⁹ During that period, NRTs emerged through the work of Thrift and other geographers mostly based in the UK. For Thrift, the approach is fundamentally about the geography of what goes on in the everyday world, the entangled movement of everything living and non-living: the ‘animic flux of life’ and ‘the vast spillage of things’. ²⁰ Crucially, the human subject and language are not seen as the primary way to access the world. With encouragement from the work of Deleuze and Latour in equal measure, the practice unsettles the divisions between the incorporeal and material and the human, nonhuman and inhuman. ²¹

Working to decentre the human subject has flourished through the rise of a range of work under the broad heading of ‘new feminist materialism’ that sees matter as ‘active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable’. ²² What have been customarily considered as solely human features such as thinking, inventing, planning and communicating are also viewed as material forces that compose human and nonhuman entities. There is not one, human, point of view but numerous perceptions from molecules to plants to animals. ²³ Many strands of feminist materialism advocate being alive to the world’s vitality, opening affirmative futures, a fundamental political and ‘ethical call’. ²⁴ A particularly strong force of feminist new materialism has encouraged scholars in social science and the humanities to become acquainted with physical and life sciences. The philosopher Stengers argues that ‘science is at last becoming a physical science’ recognising the independence of things ‘and not only of living things’. ²⁵ Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway mixing philosophy, feminist theories and advanced science has been particularly influential. Barad takes the Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s quantum theory as a starting point in developing what she calls ‘agential realism’. In reframing and refreshing Bohr’s insight that we are part of nature which we aim to comprehend, she takes forward key more-than-human objectives. She upsets the privileged position of the subject and demonstrates how science can both open entrenched dualistic thought and reveal matter’s dynamism which is often hidden through forms of representationalism. ²⁶

More recently, scholars have incorporated geological research into their enquiries and at the same time challenged what is perceived as the ‘vitalist’ core in new materialism generally and more-than-human geographies specifically. In an interview, Grosz explains that in philosophy, politics and ethics humans are often given a history in the context of the progress of life, but the geological context of the earth and its gravitational, magnetic, electrical, chemical and mineral forces are often forgotten. ²⁷ In contrast to different trajectories of vitalism and biopolitics with a strong emphasis on the agential, the ‘geological turn’ exposes the role of the inorganic mineral or chemical materials, including in their research mute, non-biotic, inhuman forces. ²⁸ Yusoff’s work focuses on dead matter and how, for example, fossil fuels have their own ‘material-energetic force’ that composes and differentiates all forms of life including the human. ²⁹ Hird and Yusoff also offer an alternative geological ‘origin story’ involving waste and toxicity. They take as a starting point Berkeley Pit, in Butte (Montana), a lake of acidic and metal laden contaminated waste left over from copper mining. Chemists have discovered that the bacteria from the anal tract of the geese had digested the lake’s metal waste. For the authors, this example demonstrates compelling arguments for revising purely biocentric as well as anthropocentric perspectives. ³⁰

In the following section of the article, from copious examples from Serres’ work, I have chosen three contrasting pathways that I think are particularly relevant to some central enquiries of more-than-human geographies. The first investigates no less than the origin of every ‘thing’ in his audacious alignment of modern physics with Lucretian atomism. The second takes forward a non-representational philosophy of sensations that teases out the intimate relations between the body and thought. The final approach incorporates a diverse range of lessons from recent discoveries in microbiology concerning the origins of life. All three contribute to his philosophy from 2000 onwards that increasingly turns towards the formation of a decentred humanism that gathers around a universal story. Serres’ multiple journeys accumulate towards the articulation of our place within, and dependency on, the earth and all living things as we face the possible extinction of our species.

Encountering Serres’ thought: things, body and life

Nobel prize-winning scientist Prigogine and philosopher Stenger commend Serres’ seemingly astonishing claim in The Birth of Physics that Lucretian physics mirrors advanced findings of chaos theory. ³¹ Serres describes how Lucretius considered that at certain times the ‘universal fall of atoms’ is disturbed by a very slight, spontaneous deviation. If equilibrium ever existed somehow, a minimal ‘relation’ or angle would eventually upset it, making a divergence, a variance. Without deviation, nothing would happen. The resulting turbulence gives birth to all things, to the world. The ‘infinite fall’ provides a model on which to base our conception of the natural genesis of the disturbance that causes things to be born. ³² Prigogine produced seminal work on chaos theory which postulates that order and chaos are not always diametrically opposed but form an intimate mix in a system. An infinitely small variation can produce a finite difference. Prigogine has been comprehensively acknowledged for introducing into physics concepts of ‘nonequilibrium’, ‘self-organisation’ and ‘dissipative structures’ which have in turn seeped into cosmology, chemistry and biology. ³³ The science here is well beyond the scope of this essay, as well as my expertise, but particularly important in relation to Serres is Prigogine’s notion of time. For Serres the arrow of time is indeterminate, constructive, an irreversible vortex of formation, instability and fluctuation, a display of probabilities and possibilities, born from fundamentally nonequilibrium conditions. ³⁴

At the heart of Serres’ philosophical practice, which is applied through dozens of books, everything is deviation from equilibrium and all levels of nature display complexity and inventiveness that traditionally we have associated with human faculties and culture. In Serres’ thought, this fundamental nonconformity or aberration is most frequently expressed in terms of the operation of the ‘parasite’ that sparks encounters, associations and bifurcations. ³⁵ In a ‘postface’ to a collection of extracts from Serres’ early writing, Prigogine and Stenger refer to his practice that ‘dissolves the distinction between the macroscopic state and the microscopic fluctuation’ where ‘local deviations echo throughout the system’ and from which things emerge. ³⁶ If equilibrium exists or ever existed somewhere, somehow, the introduction of the ‘noise’ in a system immediately provokes a difference. For Serres, the parasite is the primordial relation. ³⁷ The parasite inclines, interrupts, branches, menaces, blocks and aborts, articulating the atomic form of relations operating across material, biological and social levels. Serres frequently urges us to recognise that humans, like everything living and inert, are the product of a play of modal logic, a dance of contingencies and necessities that test out the possible and impossible. ³⁸ Here is the ultimate origin story that is rendered by Lucretius, reiterated by Prigogine and Stengers and taken by Serres as an operation that works across all levels of matter, life and the social and, at the same time, forms his underlying philosophical practice.

In Serres’ insistence on dismantling all binary thought, the abstract (for example, mathematics and modal logic) and the tangible cannot be separated. He jolts us into thinking differently about the place of humans in the world through our commonality with how all ‘things’ emerge, but he also explores commonality in a wide variety of other ways, including meditations on the body and sensations. In Hybrid Geographies, Whatmore is one of very few geographers to acknowledge the influence of Serres’ practice of allowing the sense of objects and ‘extra linguistic forces, bonds and interactions’ to permeate thought. Serres explores the possibilities of a philosophy of senses and bodies. ³⁹ Somewhat anticipating NRT, he traces how the senses have tended to be veiled and filtered by entrenched dualism that coalesce around forms of representation. He investigates the potential for experiencing what is before and beyond language, what refuses to be reduced to speech or knowledge. Words ‘stick, clue, coat, attract, avoid’. ⁴⁰ He claims that ‘not only does sensation stand behind the knowledge that presumes to speak of it, but what is more, it finds itself ousted by what we know at any given point’. ⁴¹

Lessons from physics intertwine with personal stories of the body’s capacity to sense the world unswervingly. ⁴² Serres writes about his specific location of his thought rooted in his experiences as a young man, at sea and in his love of hiking and mountain climbing. He invents knowledge from his body, sensations and experience of the earth. His personal accounts expose what philosophy has tended to ignore: ‘life, body and things’ ⁴³ Serres was always proud of his humble background that was very different from the typical academic elite in France. In his youth, Serres became familiar with heavy manual work. In the Navy he found more dangerous and life-threatening challenges to feed his later philosophy. ⁴⁴ He prompts us to remember that we sense through our body; we hear, see, taste, smell and touch through physical things: the skull, tongue, throat, muscles, nerves and skin. As Grosz puts it, ‘the meat of the body is thinking material’. ⁴⁵ From the traumatic near-death events experienced as a sailor on board a ship on fire, Serres considers touch is our most vital sense. Skin shares in and connects all the senses, entangling with the world and exchanging messages.

Turning Descartes on his head, Serres claims that in his own philosophy, he lives ‘outside’ of himself. Through the space and time exterior to the ‘I’ formed by knowledge, he tries to find ways to think, sensing the ‘given’ without the edifice of language. In Biogea, Serres gives accounts of events that enabled him to listen to the multiple things of the world and at the same time to arouse their voice: ‘I sing these strong and fragile turbulences – inert, living and human, universal’. He offers a series of meditations on different ‘ways of knowing’, with his experiences at sea especially formative: ‘the primeval Eve from whose wombs we all came, seaweed, plants and animals, bacteria and mammals, reptiles and whales, even humans’. ⁴⁶ Having lived through the splendour and hazards of the sea, he wants to ‘think’ with it. Barad suggests that ‘scholars have struggled to come to terms with the ‘weightiness’ of things. ⁴⁷ Serres’ philosophy is caressed, mingled with and worn away by the weight of the world. ⁴⁸ He tries no less than to evoke a ‘time when the great separation – insistent, all-powerful – of the intelligible and the sensible didn’t rule our minds’. ⁴⁹

My final example shows how Serres connects things and the body across a narrative co-written by recent discoveries in science concerning the origins of life. In various later books like The Incandescent, Hominescence and Branches, he takes the line of disruption followed by new materialists by connecting and relating the research of, for example, microbiologists, geophysicists and astrophysicists. But what stands out from specific enquiries of more-than-human geographies is not only the breadth of sciences that Serres incorporates in his thought, but also how he crosses disciplines, combining the inventive flows of ancient thought, the humanities, philosophy and science. ⁵⁰ For Serres, scientists are exposing the multiple scales, rungs and interconnections [échelle] of the evolution of things and life, offering a ‘reverse vision’. Dating the universe, atoms, the earth, microbes, all living species and humankind reveals an equality, providing further evidence of a universal common ground ‘through the scales of infinite greatness and smallness’. ⁵¹

Serres also recognises that recent discoveries in science are often way ahead of philosophers and social theorists in their understanding of the commonality of things and their decentring of the human. In particular, he admired the work of microbiologist Margulis who traces evolutionary history from the perspective of bacteria, the sole living inhabitants of life from four billion years ago to the development of nucleated cells two billion years later. Specifically, by showing how problem solving began by way of mutating, recombining prokaryotic DNA chains, Margulis and her colleagues deal a further blow to human exceptionalism. In researching life’s origins, she demonstrates how all life has ‘chemical memory’. Life has been ‘since its inception and with no discontinuity, chemically connected to its past. ⁵² A book written with her son explicitly challenges ideas of human uniqueness, independence and individuality. They show how ‘human capacities grow directly from other phenomena’ and our aptitudes and technologies are meagre in comparison to other parts of the biosphere’. ⁵³ Drawing on this type of research, Serres contends that no philosophy can continue to ignore all forms of life, the body and things in the context of a common oldness and our newly discovered tiny, transient place in the narrative of the universe. For instance, writing is no longer the preserve of humankind when found in combinations of DNA, but perhaps most important for Serres is the finding that all things are culture as ‘everything communicates’. ⁵⁴ His thought has always been informed by communication theory, the forming, encoding, storing and transmitting of information that necessarily involves a potential disturbance, fluctuation or ‘noise’. He underscores how communication crosses and interlinks multiple cultural levels from the variety of everyday messages sent and received by humans, to computer processing, to the behaviour of biomolecules or nucleic acids that create, encode and store information in the nucleus of every living cell. He collapses the distinction between nature and culture.

Towards a decentred universal humanism

Decentring of the human species, exploring the different reaches of the body and sensations and uncovering the agentic in matter are explored methodically and imaginatively in new materialism generally and more-than-human geographies specifically. But I contend that Serres is unique in the range of resources he brings and the relations he forms. Serres inventively anticipates and enriches many recent investigations in geography, but more importantly I go on to show how he might specifically intervene and reshape them. Through what might at first seem an odd if not contradictory assertion, Serres takes us on a voyage that rejects colonial Western humanism but at the same time leads to the telling of a shared universal narrative, a decentred or common humanism that brings together multiple stories of origins and that comes face-to-face with the ecological crisis facing the human species.

One way to understand Serres’ vision of universal humanism is to trace how it overlaps with and challenges ideas of ‘pluriversality’ as applied varyingly across science and technology studies, more-than-human geographies and decolonial thought. ⁵⁵ Watson and Huntington argue that some research in more-than-human geographies remains bound by Eurocentric scholarship and can actually reproduce colonial ways of knowing and being by enacting universalising claims. ⁵⁶ For Sundberg ‘posthuman’ geographers have productively undertaken the decentring of the human but continue to ‘enact the world as universe, meaning the ontological assumption of a singular reality or nature, about which different cultures offer distinct interpretations’. ⁵⁷ In contrast, she aims to converse with and walk alongside other ‘epistemic worlds’ in which Western cosmology would be one of many cosmologies, no longer the one that subsumes and regulates all the others, a ‘pluriverse’ rather than a universe. Overall, these scholars aim to decolonise the Western scientific practice and its underlying ontologies and epistemologies. ⁵⁸ The commencement of these latter traditions is often not found in Greece or Rome but European colonisation since 1500 that brought genocide, exploitation and the near eradication of non-European knowledge and ways of living. ⁵⁹

Despite the breadth and innovations of approaches that include Indigenous voices, I contend that an encounter with Serres’ philosophy exposes how arguments for a pluriverse often cotinue to remain inside Western scholarship. Harding, who makes a convincing argument for interrogating ideas about modernity and science from feminist and postcolonial perspectives, argues for a reassessment of Western and non-Western knowledge systems, but argues that ‘if we are to take seriously the achievements of another culture, we have to talk about it in our terms, rather than theirs’. ⁶⁰ But this begs the question: who does ‘our’ refer to? Are contemporary academics a homogenous, Western assemblage? And what is meant by ‘our terms’ that are shared by present-day scholars? But perhaps even more importantly in relation to Serres’ philosophical practice, why do we have to continue in ‘our terms’? Mercier describes how the ‘pluriverse’ is used as a conceptual tool that is presented frequently as a ‘brand new’ discipline. ⁶¹ Philo makes a similar point about more-than-human geographies generally. ‘Dancing geographies of the world, or many worlds’ are presented as splendidly new, and ‘like a shiny new product are enticing and captivating’ in promoting dazzling creativity and opening radical challenges. ⁶² Debates about the pluriverse remain within the competitive, promotional chatter of Western academia.

Mercier also makes a strong argument that those who wish to claim a novel ‘pluriverse’ cannot avoid bringing their own discourse close to an epistemology in the traditional Western sense of the term. More fundamentally, it is my contention that in the attempt to break from Eurocentric universalism, these writers frequently remain inside the theoretical, stylistic, discursive, disciplinary and institutional boundaries of the latter. When listening to a lecture by Latour, Todd voices her anger that relevant and insightful Indigenous thought was excluded in the context of a ‘Euro-Western academic narrative, in this case the trendy and dominant Ontological Turn (and/or post-humanism, and/or cosmopolitics—all three of which share tangled roots’. ⁶³ Endorsing her point wholeheartedly, my argument is that those who purport to claim a pluriverse in recognition of multiple Indigenous voices also exclude all those outside academia, Indigenous or not, by their slavishness to Western philosophical frameworks and their seeming insistence on making, or marketing, ever-new hybrid terminology. In contrast, Serres’ philosophy goes out of its way to resist participating inside customary academic boundaries and specifically the Western frameworks of ontology and epistemology. ⁶⁴ He happens to find these two philosophical terms rather ‘ugly’ but more significantly for Serres their seeming impressiveness prevents ‘original’ thought. ⁶⁵ Whether established philosophical terminology, or endlessly proliferating contemporary hybrids, Serres claims they above all remain hierarchical and exclusive and ‘serve only to separate the sectarians of the parish from those who are excluded from the conversation so that the masters can hold on to some form of power’. ⁶⁶

Specialist academic terms are like books that ‘only seek out each other, to chatter amongst themselves’. ⁶⁷ Serres is not being pedantic in challenging what he sees as vacuous uses of words like ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, hermeneutics and so on (along with ‘post’, ‘new’ and turns’), he finds they hinder rather than help largely because they control thought within modern European frameworks. Serres was a white, European male who, despite his down-to-earth upbringing, became a professor at two prestigious Western universities. I have indicated some ways in which Serres swerved from the mainstream preoccupations of traditional and contemporary philosophers with his concentration on things, body and life and the range of resources he incorporated into his philosophical practice. At the same time, he frequently reveals his disdain for insular and exclusive Western scholarship and notes, for instance, that when the latter research ‘Assyrians, the Latins or Renaissance figures’ they insist they are studying ‘history’, but when others describe the customs of the ‘Arapesh or the Kwakiutl’ they are concerned with ‘ethnology’. It is as if history only starts with writing, ‘a primary apartheid in our ways of thinking’, a colonial violence that started at least as far back as the Roman Empire which destroyed hundreds of oral traditions. We need to recognise the latter traditions in the form of riddles, proverbs and stories that stretch across a much longer and wider global history. ⁶⁸ In Statues, Serres thoroughly undermines Western assumptions about the origin of science which are not found in anything subjective or formal but in the objects of the natural world and different communities’ collective response to things. He considers there are more philosophical lessons from ancient Egypt than Greece. Serres also argues that the ‘religions of language and speech’ – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – have ‘won so completely and have invaded space and our cultures so universally that we no longer see their victory as the end of the crushing of the religions of things’. ⁶⁹ Western scholarship has not just excluded Indigenous knowledge. By ignoring or looking down on popular and ancient customs, Serres claims ‘we’ve forgotten everything’. ⁷⁰

Serres does confirm the fundamental arguments of multiversity, arguing persistently against the exclusion of non-European thought and practice, the diversity of all living species and the inert planet. But as stated above in relation to his reading of Lucretius’s atomic philosophy, he also shows how different forms of knowledge can be isomorphic. As Serres points out, the ‘sexagesimal calculations’ of Babylonia cuneiform tablets are not ‘primitive’ calculations; they actually mirror algorithmic practices of modern computers. ⁷¹ He goes further by arguing that we should consider not only that Western science and Indigenous knowledge sit ‘alongside’ each other but also that the former is just beginning to catch up with the latter. Western philosophy is often well behind ancient thought and Serres shows how a myriad of recent discoveries by paleoanthropologists, archaeologists and geologists have turned arrogant Western assumptions upside down.

‘Our wisdom now places Lucy before Pliny the elder, the scattered bones in the valley of Chad before Homer the blind and Noah the Winegrower, and our African father and mother before Eden’s Adam and Eve, before every ancestor venerated by every culture; this wisdom reads the genetic Code of Hammurabi.’ ⁷²

Serres is distinct in the breadth and diversity of interconnected paths that undermine human exceptionalism, but I contend that his most original contribution involves reinvigorating terms that are usually thoroughly rejected by more-than-human scholars and particularly those who argue for a pluriverse. Serres fully recognises that ‘the word universal’ always seems to conceal an imperialism’. ⁷³ Declaring the ‘universal the rights of man’ clearly involves the latter. But what about the universality of gravity, DNA or music and dance? Blaser says that the different worlds of the pluriverse ‘bring themselves into being and sustain themselves even as they interact, interfere and mingle with each other’. ⁷⁴ Serres conception of the universe is as fluid and processual as Blaser’s description, a branching out in different directions, but it is much more than an act of imagining or bringing into being. Serres’ universe is tangible, anchored in the earth and all life, as his philosophy over decades has attempted to establish.

For Serres, the universe involves what is ‘turned’ (vers/vert) to form a whole (unus) and is never settled. The universe reflects Serres whole philosophical practice that veers, transverses, converses, reverses and diverges to relate and bring together different types of ‘evidence’. ⁷⁵ I have indicated some of his techniques of thought, but there are numerous configurations that highlight flexibility, heterogeneous relations, exchanges and combinations. He is perhaps most well-known for what he describes as non-metric ‘topological’ thought that expresses positions through prepositions and which he discovered through reading Leibniz. ⁷⁶ In mathematical terms, topology is at its simplest properties that form through twisting, turning and stretching. Post-mathematical topology in geography has been a method of thinking about relationality, space and movement beyond metrics and mapping that has informed research in human geography, but at the same time Serres’ whole philosophy is a topological practice that is turbulent, unexpected, open and relational. He thinks through words that recognise positions, particularly prepositions, to include ‘the very formation of things, world time, the chaos of the planet, the quivering of living things’. ⁷⁷ Elsewhere he describes his philosophy as like a movement of dance, or music or migratory birds. Above all, it is in difference and variety that work towards the universal.

In turn, humanism for Serres is the process of growing towards the universal through the recognition of everything that we have in common with all life forms and the inert world. As many cosmologies evoke, humans all come from the same earth, mother and matter. Serres often reminds us that we should not forget that the word ‘nature’ stems from natura linked to the course of things, quality, the universe and, with ties to natus, referring to birth, rebirth, mother earth, the ‘universal hostess’. ⁷⁸ Nature is not something passive, out there; it is always in the ‘process of being born’ and it something that can be reinvented, not just for ourselves but for the earth that sustains us. Nature is invention, inseparable from culture. Serres emphasises the slow pace and inter-relatedness of the history of matter, bodily experience and all life forms that was recognised in what he calls the ‘religion of things’, a weighty empirical realm that modern discourses have excluded. ⁷⁹ We are the result of an infinite set of teeming possibilities. Like everything, from the Big Bang onwards, no less, everything has the play of modality in common, ‘particles of noise, jolts, tips of flames, jingle bells’. ⁸⁰ We are a mere ‘subset of branches’ of a what he calls, with a nudge at the old post-structuralists, an inclusive ‘Grand Narrative’ and not the centre of the story of origins. ⁸¹ Following Césaire’s and Fanon’s ideas of a new ‘hybrid science of the Word’ in which the ‘study of the Word would now determine the study of nature’ (the capital letter transferred from the latter to the former), Wynter remains convinced of the imaginative possibilities of language, stories and poetry. ⁸² Africa becomes the ‘human origin geography’ in which the birthplace of language dislodges the Western secular ‘biocentric’ story. Serres endorses this principle unreservedly but incorporates the origins of language within a much deeper and wider story of the whole earth. Nature is always a ‘condition’ of our knowledge and not words. He does not trace hominisation to language but something much more fundamental and earth-bound like starting to walk on two feet, the discovery of fire or the use of tools. ⁸³ Words distinguish the human species too much.

At the same time, Serres observes that the earth is starting to intervene and demand attention, entering our narratives, knowledge, ethics, law, technology and general anxiety whether we like it or not. ⁸⁴ For Serres, the earth that keeps us alive, transcends us and can eradicate us is ‘starting to scream’. ⁸⁵ If we are to survive, we need urgently to form a universal pact with the rest of nature, our planet, which recognises what he has persistently explored throughout his philosophy: our body, senses, subjectivity and knowledge are inseparable from the world. ⁸⁶ He finds direct lessons from Lucretius. As Prigogine and Stengers explain, with explicit reference to Serres, Lucretius replaces the idea of foedera fati, deterministic order and simple repetition governed by the laws of fate, with foedera naturae, an alliance, a form of ‘contract with nature’ that focuses on relations and alliances. ⁸⁷ In Lucretian terms, we are not strangers to nature, an enemy or master; we are a partner. We are immersed in foedera naturae, in the world and of the world, with shared beginnings, codes and ways of knowing. Serres’ worked on his idea of a ‘natural contract’ for nearly 30 years and it is impossible to capture its breadth in this article but a key point to clarify is that the contract is clearly not a document to sign. ⁸⁸ The contract recites itself through diverse forms of evidence, as indicated above, articulating a Grand Narrative. The latter needs to be endorsed and developed through other voices from the exact sciences, human sciences, the humanities, religions and Indigenous thought and practice. The one stipulation is that the contract has to be written in the ‘dialect of things’, the body and all life forms. ⁸⁹ At the end of The Incandescent, Serres puts forward the outline of a common, global university syllabus based on his Grand Narrative, involving the humanities and the sciences in equal measure for the ‘world, for peace, for the protection of the earth’. ⁹⁰ We need educational space that is ‘mixed and multi-coloured, striped like a tiger, blended in different shades, dyed with numerous pigments, twinkling like the stars – real like a landscape’ or perhaps like a ‘labyrinth of electronic chips’. ⁹¹

Conclusion: we remain less than human

It is clearly impossible to capture in a few words the innovative diversity of Serres’ work that is relevant to more-than-human geographies. Like all snapshots, it tends to be too neat and tidy, something which totally goes against the grain of Serres’ thought. In many ways, Serres’ philosophy responds to his definition of ‘geography’ which he describes as the ‘intersection of ten or twenty fields of knowledge’, involving the systems, experiments and laws of the exact sciences but also generating numerous crossovers with Indigenous, local and global stories and histories. Geography provides for Serres no less than a ‘model for models’, both abstract and tangible, touching all our senses and at the same time presenting a pure generalisation: ‘a universal variety’. ⁹² Across all his philosophy, but particularly in later work, I contend that Serres comprehensively and convincingly anticipates, reinforces and diversifies research undertaken through more-than-human geography. However, describing his work as nonhuman, posthuman, inhuman, more-than-human, neo-materialist and so on does not help. All these labels compete inside the chatter of a Western philosophical tradition that he refuses to join. We do not have to go as far as to accept that ‘universities are like stars we see but have been dead for ages, like museums’ but Serres convincingly argues that academic books and articles tend to ‘stifle originality’. ⁹³ Clearly, we cannot do without formats, order, writing conventions and training but he dislodges standard Western approaches to doing philosophy by concentrating on things, the body and life in all its forms outside institutionally homogenised frameworks.

What are the lessons for readers of this journal? What do we learn from encountering Serres’ philosophy? First and foremost, a recognition of a body of work that tirelessly attempts to come to terms with the ‘weightiness’ of the world. Research in geography has productively applied aspects of Serres’ thoroughly relational or topological approach that goes beyond metric, mechanical, organic and segmented conceptions of space. But Serres takes the relational to another level, not just breaking down the divisions between, but bringing into play the equation of, nature and culture, the abstract and tangible, the body and things, ancient and modern, humanities and science. He scrupulously disrupts the use of his philosophy as a toolbox of concepts and methods. His philosophy is more an encouragement not to create a new fashion or brand, but to invent a new thought, relation, correspondence, inclusion. Specifically, he deepens and extends the most imaginative articulations of the pluriverse encapsulated in more-than-human geographies, but he does not add different cultural perspectives together; he inventively interconnects them to form a vibrant mosaic or bouquet, to use two of his favourite metaphors. Different ways of knowing do not sit alongside or even converse with Western approaches; the former utterly unsettle and replace the latter. Serres’ uncompromising starting position is that Western philosophy has forgotten ‘everything’. Ideas of pluriversality are questioned not in terms of their inclusions, but their exclusions. What is more, his philosophy audaciously opens up the challenge of conceiving a universal humanism. For Serres the universe is tangible, anchored in the earth and all life, substantiated by the most advanced sciences and ancient and Indigenous modes of thought. ‘Nature’ is also reclaimed as a process of invention that is a practice of, and not a distinction from, culture. Nature is culture. Humanism concerns the reinvention of nature for the survival of the human species and the enrichment of the earth that maintains us. He decentres the human through the shared recognition of the universal.

Serres offers an origin story that needs to be shared and nourished inside and outside the academy. In his very last book passed to his publisher a day before his death, Serres describes a necessary movement away from the personal and subjective towards the collective and objective, a universal affiliation that he finds fundamental to the spirituality of different religions and beliefs. ⁹⁴ This last book is offered as a final, tentative fusion of relations. His ‘insane hope’ is to articulate a universal that he also finds through the abstractions of science, the formal rhythms that run through everything, living and inert. He remains unsure whether spirituality is at the heart or one dimension of the universal. He speaks again of a Grand Narrative with the chance that we might recognise that at present we are much less than human.