Serres Quotes

“There are objects I seem to live through more than view. I think I pick up noises from them more than I see them, touch them, or conceive them. I hear without clear frontiers, without divining an isolated source, hearing is better at integrating than analyzing, the ear knows how to lose track. By the ear, of course, I hear: temple, drum, pavilion, but also my entire body and the whole of my skin. We are immersed in sound just as we are immersed in air and light... We breathe background noise, the taut and tenuous agitation at the bottom of the world, through all our pores and papillae, we collect within us the noise of organization, a hot flame and dance of integers. My acouphenes, a mad murmur, tense and constant in hearing, speak to me of my ashes, perhaps, the ones whence I came, the ones to which I will return. Background noise is the ground of our perception, absolutely uninterrupted, it is our perennial sustenance, the element of the software of all our logic. It is the residue and the cesspool of our messages.”
― Michel Serres, Genesis

“For Serres, everything exists in at least three distinct broad temporalities (At 126–7) which can be further subdivided and combined in different ways. The fi rst time is the reversible, clockwork time of the classical age, when no fundamental law was thought to dictate the direction of time’s flow. The second time is the globally entropic time of the second law of thermodynamics, of Carnot’s heat engine that carries everything towards death. This thermodynamic principle was formalised in 1865 by Rudolph Clausius who, drawing heavily on Carnot’s work on heat engines, coined the term ‘entropy’ to describe the irrecoverable heat inevitably lost from any mechanical system. Laplace brings this irreversible time into the natural sciences with a cosmogony that supplements Newton’s reversible cosmology with a dimension of becoming (JVSH 36), and Darwin inscribes irreversible time at the heart of the natural sciences (JVSH 39). The eternal universe of Pascal is no more: ‘Immersed in time the universe likewise is born, develops, evolves, wears out and, perhaps, will die’ (JVSH 36).133 Time enters into science. The third time is the locally negentropic time of codes and information, preserving complexity against the general decay of order (H4 287).134 The idea of negentropy was developed in the 1930s, describing a pocket of information preserved in a wider context of entropic decay (see JVSH 136). It is a time encrusted in the living beings who ‘follow an evolution that Bergson called creative, of which we can at least say that it runs in the opposite direction to the thermodynamic arrow’ (H5 79) (Watkin 2020: 132)”
― Christopher Watkin, Michel Serres: Figures of Thought