Michel Serres' Poetics of EARTH Relations

Lecture Performance, Rethinking Relations, Michel Serres and the Environmental Humanities. International Conference, TU Dresden, 9. - 12. November 2022, Panel Earthly Relations

Intimate Attraction
Each day, we can more strongly feel Michel Serres’ diagnosis of how the ecological disasters of our ongoing treatment of the Earth express an excess of appropriation and possessiveness, and a lack of being enmeshed, brimming with attention, affection and care, in felt relations with others, creating „toward them and through them, with them and in them“ (Biogea, 31). What we are missing today are the talents of lovers. To caress; to become intimate in attentive, contemplative, respectful modes; to harness creativity in others and be changed by their creative forces.

In an optimistic glint, Serres envisions the Nature Contract - not only as a precondition for the emergence of treaties and new formalized, actualized, institutionalized attributions of rights to other than human entities such as rivers and mountains, animals and plants, soil and ocean.

Yes, the Nature Contract is the foundation for such treaties, as it is the foundation for corresponding politics, sciences, and arts. But it is also the attempt to bring into form the intuition that the way we think relations changes how they can be lived; as it is the attempt to find a passage into the direction of a transcendental of relations, the condition of possibility of the most possible encompassing relations.

In a conversation with Bruno Latour, Michel Serres points the core of his Nature Contract as the description of Global Relations, fluctuating like a turbulence; or more precisely as the question: How is it possible to think the relations between two globalities, a global object EARTH, a global subject humanity? In Serres view, there is no theory which allows such a description; thus the passage he chooses in his Nature Contract is to narrate the progressive construction of such a thought, and to propose three images for the relation of humanity and Earth.

The progression can be simply summarized as in three acts: Act 1, the past: we as humans acted in a world, with enabled our actions, but which was not dependent upon us. Act 2, the recent past: With the discoveries of our ever more far reaching impact, everything became to be dependent upon us. Man-made, in our glory, to our will, formed by our power. In the third act, another shift occurs: having made everything respond to us, to be at our service, we now do not longer control this world which depends upon us. It continues to depend on us; but this very fact itself no longer depends upon us.

In these three acts, the world as object and the human as subject slowly change attributes. Now, humanity has become subject-object of the Earth, which as object-subject acts on her turn - trembles, quivers, speaks in forces and interaction that are dependent upon us, and turn us dependent upon them. In the third act of our current time, the world is no longer a passive object; and we are no longer subjects in control and possession. In this third act, Earth and humanity appear as two new entities, on equal level, and this brings them into the position of being partners in a new nature contract.

This Nature Contract does not have to be written nor signed to be in force; it is enforced if we recognize that we already live in act 3, being depend upon a world which we have made dependent upon us. (At such a recognition is of course viable in our actions. With the massive support and solidarity after the Tsunami in the turn of 2004/05, the contract has been indeed enforced, says Serres in one of his Sunday conversations on Radio France.)

Besides his inspiration for legal reforms such as the gradual extension of the concept of a rights holder as well as the shift from negative to positive rights, Serres’ Nature Contract entails thus many threads to re-sense our earthly relations: to rethink them, and to feel them in a different manner. If we pick one word from the Nature Contract to designate such a relation, it could be „love“.

Love enters the Nature Contract as mode of encounter, yes, and as moral obligation:

You shall not engage in violence against humans, against all living beings and the planet Earth, and in violent thinking or spirit (from which violent acts stem). This is the minimum obligation.

The maximum obligation is to love. You shall love. All. All global ensembles.

Love is also the final image of the Nature Contract, which ends with a series of little narrations and images for the relation of humanity and Earth:

In a first image, we see humanity as an embryo, connected by the umbilical cord with her mother, Earth.

In the second image, we see the Earth as a daughter, connected to her mother, the Sciences.

In the third image, an individual seems to be involved in an act of making love with the Earth.

If relationships are healthy, they fluctuate, says Serres.

How can find into such a moving, vibrating new relationship with the Earth?

Love, this term may perhaps be a little startling when we think about two such grand entities, the total global whole Earth and the global collective Humanity. The terms may be a bit large, no so easy to enter them and let them be filled and felt by our bodies.

How can learn to love the Earth as a whole?

In my reading, Serres proposes throughout his writings at least three passages into learning how to love the Earth - a relational, a sensual, and a musical passage. Let’s take them together, one after the other.

The relational passage involves that we read the Earth in and through Serres major interest in relations. I will propose two of such readings.

The first reading of Earth is based on a multiplication of relations, unfolding their manifoldness as well as turbulences. The Nature Contract describes not two grand abstract entities in their relation; but three ensembles of relations, the imbalanced ensembles of humanity and Earth, and the relations between these two. Relations in multiplication.

Human beings, of all ages, with their contingent, meaningful stories, a word written on a wall, a preferences tattooed in the skin, leather, a fur, a fox, flocks of birds, crystals in becoming, spiraling water in a creek, a can in the grass, smoke, clouds, empty boxes, cables in clay, fossils, corporate design, management conferences, a unicorn.

The second reading takes these multiplications a bit further.

The Earth of the Nature Contract, she is not the sum of earthly beings and process, not the total of earthly elements and their relations. Rather, she is that present-absent which throws us open. Which turns us open for irritations which stem from her as that which we cannot define, and thus not control. To move the world out of our possession, this is one major impetus of the Nature Contract.

„When I describe the dance of flames or the ensemble of relations between us and the Earth as a whole, I target a transcendental of relations.“ Feeling-thinking this conditional space of possible relations, brimming with turbulent passages, changes our attitude towards the Earth. One image, again, is that of a partner which is a lover. The Nature Contract request us to be willing to be challenged by her, in order to let her come to her right. This is a real decentralizing of the Human; this is the proposal of a new open and performative bond, to be specified and enacted again and again and again.

Now, if we want to enter this new bond, the second passage comes into play, yes, playful, sensitive, artful, aesthetic - the sensual.

“We are so moved that we change colour, a peacock’s tail on a rainbow, like spectra suddenly becoming unstable. You embrace me mottled, I leave you shimmering like watered silk; I embrace you as a network, you leave me as a bundle. We caress each other along our contour lines, we leave each other with various knots, in embraces that have changed shape.“ (FS 27f)

In embraces that have changed shape.

Two bodies, mingled bodies in intimate relation. Skin enmeshed, moired, moiré. Bodies. Yours, mine, the bodies of other animals, plants, crystals, waves, clouds, texts, stones, stars, the body of a word, the body of Earth. In each body, a mysterious spark ignites and fades, flashes, hides, forms and transforms. In each, infinite possibilities brimming with meaning reach out for each other, forming new assemblies, emerging, dissolving.

This is the first reading of Earth. A multiplicity of relations. A manifoldedness of bodies in intimate relations.

But also: a relation between my body and the body of the Earth. When I think of the Earth as a body, how does my thinking change? And how my ability to touch and be touched?

An experiment in this sensual passage: Think of everything that you touch as body of the Earth.

Your own body. The body of the chair, the ground beneath your feet, the bodies of pen and paper, ink and words. The body next to you. The body of this room in the body of this building.

Imagine that you touch the body of the Earth in everything you touch.

Imagine that the Earth touches you.

Forces of attraction, from gravitational to molecular levels.

Touch yourself, like Serres in The Five Senses; with the tip of your middle finger touch your lips. (FS18)

Try to feel the intimate attraction, the slight vibration between your fingertip and your lips. Let your finger touch your lips lovingly; let your lips kiss your finger lovingly.

Feel the heterogeneous mingling; feel the singular forms of finger and lips, and the passages between them (FS 24) This is the mode of contact, of contingency; forces reacting and giving new birth to entities; and the free condition of mixtures.

Loving the Earth. In the first reading of the Earth as a multiplicity of bodies, to love the Earth means to unfold our vibrant relations with a multiplicity of bodies on various scales, and to relate somatically with the inner glimmer of things.

This may feel daring.

„If you want to save yourself, take risks. If you want to save your soul, do not hesitate, here and now, to entrust it to the variable storm. An inconstant aurora borealis bursts forth in the night. It spreads, blazing or bleeding, like those footlights that never stop blinking, whether they are switched on or off. You will not change if you do not yield to these inconstancies and deviations. More importantly, you will not know.” (FS 27f)

This is feeling the second reading of Earth. The variable storm are the turbulent passages. We will never fully grasp her, but we can throw ourselves open, entrust it to this storm, in order to be changed. Daring. There is no short cut in experiencing, no straight line, no strategy of extremes in the discovery of touch that is love.

Daring, as the third passage, the musical. This passage will be the most difficult.

How to bring into language the passage that music takes, from the thorny Tohuwabohu to the smooth sense, from hard bodies to soft signs?

So I will take music herself as a companion to lead us into her passage.

But let us begin the with the relational and the sensual, passages we know already. Place a hand on your heart, if you want, feel its pulse. Rhythm.

Rhythm, Polyhymnia, is the first muse of the nine sisters who in their combined effort bring music into being; the pantomime Polyhymnia lives through rhythm. The rhythm of spiral galaxies, stars rotating around other stars, living beings with drumming hearts, rhymed verse. (M25)

„When humans, living beings and the universe produce noise, they emit signals, which are traversed by rhythms“ (M26).

Now sink even deeper, within, inside the heart beat, closer to noise, the stillness brimming with possibility, the three layers of noise: of the world, of living beings, of the humans. Receive noise like the Sibylles, Bacchantines, like Pythia, with your limps, your feet, knees, hips, belly, back, the narrow, endless spine.
From this first receptive ability for noise, music, only then language, sense, sciences emerge.

Open your skin. Listen with your body.

„Our voices come from the wind and its trembling gusts; they come from our lungs and those of the world; from our blood vessels and the loud rush of the ocean; from the living beings of the Earth and the birds of the sky; from the wish to live, the pulsing clitoris; the Tohuwabohu of the universe (…)
Transform your body into a stem with roots reaching deep, its branches filled with the chirping of swarms of birds, being captured by a breeze. In this way, your flying voice will rise, from the Earth through your volcanic body, from the air through your tree body, from the waters through your river body, from the fire through your ovenbody.“ (M12)

What happens in these metamorphoses? Which passage - onto, towards love - can be found here?
This is the passage most difficult to describe, for oneself, for others; and the passage many of Serres’ books end with.

The passage from the background noise, the Tohuwabohu, the screaming universe, the fundamental rush of the world, in which we find three interwoven background noises: a first and permanent of the world, a second, intense and more rarely, of living beings; and a third, the noise of societies seeking for sense, blindly, everywhere.

Music, precondition of sense and language, smooths thorns, adds signals. First sounds appear, patterns.

The body hears, vibrates, receives the noise of the world, the living, the humans; cacophonies, cascades of combinations, contingent vibrations. The body weaves the vibrations and rhythms together, weaves itself together with life, rivers, trees, bird, Earth, galaxies.

Only then, sense appears. Music itself is indefinite, infinite, brimming with unending possible relations. She is the passage between the noise and the sense. This is the musical passage, led by the nine muses; explored by Serres together with Odysseus, in his own musical journeys, and a musical reading of the Genesis. Music, close to the rhythms of the world, and close to the rushes of signs. Music is in-between; music is accretion. Here, the concrete fuses. The flesh with the sense, the hard with the soft, the dense with the smooth, matter with form.

The difficult paradox to speak of music which is indefinite, close to the stem, fountain, source of the Grand Récit of Earth, living beings, humans. And thus Serres not only speaks about music, but he performs the musical passage in his writing. The sensitivity for sound, vibration, coloratura is woven into Serres’ writing. In motives; rhythmically; and in the variation of manifolded elements in infinite manner.

Even if we agree with Serres that sense defines, and music not - in Serres’ writing, sense remains closely related to music, open, ready to vibrate. His language expresses a specific relationship between language and objects, in which words are neither simple expressions of the world nor purely self-referential sign systems but both of them bodies with consequences for each other.

The relational, the sensual, the musical - with these three passages, Serres offers of a philosophy of earthly relations, as the art of approximation towards something which is too grand and complex to be an analytical object but needs to be our partner in thinking and sensing. The Earth.

Sources: Michel Serres: Biogea; Music; The Five Senses; The New Nature Contract