Hominescence

Michel Serres

Editions Le Pommier, Paris, 2001 [1998].  Subsequent numbers in square brackets refer to the page numbers of this publication.  Serres’ book has three  sections which follow on from a long introduction.  The first of these is simply entitled ‘The Body’.  This is further sub-divided and the titles in bold given below correspond to these sub-divisions, while those in italics introduce even smaller step in his argument – typically they focus on a new figure, metaphor, or example.

N.B. what follows is not a literal translation.

How our bodies change

Breaking away from equilibrium: the second prevailing wind

[54]

Perhaps one should recognise two different rhythms, the first, regular, that of the electrocardiogram, and another, which appears to be random, that of the electroencephalogram.  In our bodies, therefore, stable states exist alongside unpredictable breaks and hesitations; does the body conduct itself, therefore, like the drawer of my desk and the world beyond, in one a watch faithful to the regular passing of time and in the room itself a barometer which moves capriciously with the changing weather?  Does the body live in two times, one of which never ceases to split into two? - on the one hand repetition, on the other invention; on the one hand circulation, like the planets, on the other contingency?

[55]

Like our metabolism, evolution itself combines two contradictory states: abrupt changes and constant stabilities, the clashing of two times, heart and head, watch and barometer.  Certainly, our bodies must adapt to their environments, under pain of death, but in so doing they also search for the means to create something new; this is the measure of how life advances amongst species, they become independent of their environment.  In both the short and long-term, our bodies, and species themselves, ceaselessly create a dynamic balance between the horizontal and the inclined plane.  This is why lived time follows the regularities of clockwork, the rhythm of the orbiting planets, the growth of negative entropy, but also a strange progress towards complexity.

[58]

The Balance Sheet

Briefly, in recent decades, whatever else may be said, there is a new body.  More than simply a matter of history, this rupture with the past touches upon anthropology, the evolution of human beings, and the global process I have called ‘hominisation’.  Certainly, I have not wanted to re-tell stories that have been documented elsewhere, and neither have I provided the details of medical practices, pharmaceutical developments, the politics of vaccination, the prevention of disease and the maintenance of public health, the reduction in work, the introduction of Health & Safety legislation, the expansion of the rule of hygiene …  because all of these stories of public interest converge towards a result that is more striking than their simple [59] addition: the anthropological transformation of the body.  Certainly, such a change has benefited from the discoveries and applications of researchers and institutions, and from the many specialists who have written in detail about each change, but the result surpasses these ordinary means of recording the passage of time, since it touches upon evolution.

This new body reconstitutes, in effect, what was the aesthetic, the moral and the political, the violent and the cognitive, and especially the sense of being in the world.  This irruption with the past took place around the 1970s, amongst a silence of existing philosophies, when in May 1968 students began chanting all over the world their refusal to accept the existing order of things – and the significance of their break is only now being recognised.  Who understood then what passed during those days of riot?  All took as political an event which simply intervened in the normal biology of development: the new generation of bodies had reached adulthood.  Has there ever been a revolution before that was neither economic nor political?

The First Turn to Hominescence

The Exodarwinism of artefacts and techniques

[65]

Millions of years were needed for birds to gain their wings and their feathers; in several months humans constructed an aircraft.  This increase in the speed of development defines well enough what is meant by ‘technique’.  With the invention of the first tools we moved out of evolution and into culture.  Through mutation and selection, species have developed various organs or bodily functions which unexpectedly pre-adapted them to the exigencies of the environment.   Reptiles started to fly when the development of lateral outgrowths could effectively become wings.  But with the advent of technique, humans need neither such patience nor such radical bodily change, and because of this they also face much less risk of extinction.  Once the plane has been built, we can simply climb aboard; when making a tool is sufficient, the body can remain the same as it was.   This is what I have called the escape from the laws of evolution: having decoupled his body from the necessity of undergoing slow change, Homo sapiens now controls his own rapid production.  As each adaptation is required, a sword, a shaped construction stone, or a missile responds to the need far faster than any hazardous and interminable evolutionary change could ever match.  The hare of technology has overtaken the tortoise of evolution.

I call this movement from away from the body exodarwinism, since it involves the use of artefacts which externalise the means [66] of adaptation.  Thus, having left evolution behind from the moment when we developed the first tools, we enter into this new exodarwinian time.  Its originality is such as to affects the nature of the tools themselves.  They are thrust into an alternative evolution, since they undergo transformation as substitutes for ourselves.  Instead of sculpting our bodies over time, time now fashions these objects through the mediation of our manual expertise and large brains.  Were these bodily changes the last adaptations needed in order to make possible this process of externalisation? – perhaps we will know one day.  But in utilising the past tense this description perhaps introduces a mistake; the processes involved may have taken an immensely long time but they continue even today.

Getting Under Way

This stone serves as a hammer in place of a fist, more fragile than the stone but serving as its model, and this lever exteriorises the movements of the forearm …  Thus there has always been a sort of workshop, in all the senses that one can give to this word, which evokes at one and the same time the devices themselves, their matching to bodily functions, and their distancing of effect, their externalisation, this loss of parts of our bodies in artefacts and their subsequent adventures in the world at large.  Our vital functions have been dispersed outside of ourselves within inert but intelligently designed things, and this objectification enables better performance.  The wheel spins quickly and without tiring, substituting the sections of a sphere for the hips, knees, and ankles brought into play during walking.  Strangely trinitarian in form and power, artefacts introduce the reign of inert matter: stone, bronze, iron or fire, whatever one wishes to call spirit, fertile with respect to purpose, flexible with respect to means, and productive in terms of result, partaking in all the functions of living, feeding, seeing, [67]moving, carrying, action at a distance and, later, reproduction.  Thus tools enter our time, and their own evolution reproduces infinitely more quickly the circumstances which previously changed our own bodies, which in response, change less.

I imagine that this exodarwinian culture arose at the same time as the first stone was shaped, and that it developed as part of these 'workshops'.  It was then that our evolution became doubled.  Humanity began progressively to make its separation from the other inhabitants of the world, a decisive event.  And there also began what the philosophers call nature and what the naturalists call co-evolution.  Since the manufacture of this first tool, we have never experienced the same world as other animals.  We began to construct a house of our own which could replace the world.

So, the first shaped flint was also the first foundation stone of a third dwelling place, built between the two original houses of the body and the world.  And this new construction began itself to evolve.  We have never again moved away from it, as the walls have become larger and their potential to separate us from other living things has grown - things which can only live in a body hardened against a hostile world.

How Nature Enters into Cultures

[134]

In the past or more recently, before the end of the Neolithic or before I grow any older, between nature, which no-one can find any more on any map, and a culture, assumed to consist of human ways, customs, and fine arts, there once existed a separate habitat between the two, which the techniques of town life have obliterated, but from where we all come.  This is the once common experience of agriculture and cultivation offered by farm life in all its variety, before the animals themselves were separated and shut up inside stalls like those on a battery farm: and like the youngsters at school, the not-yet adults at university, and the dying in old people’s homes.  Clear and distinct, the essence of this habitat was a horror of blending.  Nature-culture, labouring and grazing, I do not know how to name it, you can make your own choice since the name matters little, except that do not call the pattern of this experience sub-cultural, under the vain pretext that it can be ignored.

For the idea of there once having been a common habitat there is a proper name: domestication, which signifies, especially, that men [135]share with animals the same environmental niche.  But don’t start by asking which animals were enslaved first; ask instead which space which species shared for their haunts.  As certain insects support others by feeding them, so that they can subsequently borrow their energy, and even their vital functions, so parasitism accompanies a large part of life’s actions; the essential problem of domestication turns around the nature of the house, the habitat, not the man, nor his actions.  What happens in this hotel? - in what aspect of farm life are there equivalent relationships?  Because it is in this mixed society of animals and humans that characteristic and perceptible changes must emerge, where a certain warm understanding begins, common, reciprocal, and, above all, true, where the strategies of the hunt and of camouflage are weakened, along with the readiness to warn and frighten off predators.