Literature and the Exact Sciences

Michel Serres; Roxanne Lapidus

SubStance, Vol. 18, No. 2, Issue 59. (1989), pp. 3-34.

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Literature and the Exact Sciences

Michel Serres

Endangered Heritage

I believe that every body of literature, and more broadly, the sum of all
academic, literary and popular traditions, anecdotes and songs, old wives'
tales, sayings and cliches, beliefs, myths, languages, and even religions,
form a sort of reserve, a stock, the local treasure of ethnic groups, of
cultures, of diverse groups, and that these constitute, in addition, the glob-
al treasure of mankind, accumulated in a fluctuating and unstable way
throughout history and time. This immense reserve of intelligence and
language, of experience, of errors and attempts, seems to me to be hence-
forth endangered, just as the evolutionary stock of species in the primitive
forests and the changing treasure of the animal species are on the point of
disappearing. Time is in danger.
In danger, first of all, for an ordinary reason: the harsh competition
between local strains, which destroy themselves as well as others. This
death is neither a fact of life, as is believed, nor the guarantee of expansion,
of power. Worse, the recent appropriation by a single culture of the major-
ity of the media, of the means of communication and of the stockpiles of
information, precipitates the sacking of cultural treasures. Some works are
already in ashes or inaccessible in the jungle conditions of war; they will be
completely destroyed under the domination of a single cultural type. I
hope to die before hearing only a single language spoken in the world.
Such a world will be a barbarous wasteland, unliveable. Imagine our plan-
et inhabited exclusively by a single species-by ferns, only, or by billions of
lizards. One end of the world like another would be rung in, with the total
victory of the strongest: the entire earth invaded by identical ants. By a
single way of living and of speaking.
Time is in danger, subsequently and especially, for a very new reason:
the crushing of all cultures by the culture that is led astray by the exact
sciences. The exact sciences take all the places and soon all the space:
money, professional openings, techniques, research, politics, power, the
religious confidence of the population. Tomorrow the world will not speak

Substance No 59, 1989

4 Michel Serres

English so much as one of the informational languages, will not speak

scientific Greek so much as a kind of algorithm. Here the complete tyran-
ny-the earth entirely covered with l i z a r d s 4 o e s not come from a single
locality that would forcibly take the place of all others, from a single
language that would impose itself, no matter how unique, as a universal
language. The terror comes, if I dare to say it, not from the fact of power,
but from rightness. The thing is that science is right-it is demonstrably
right, factually right. It is thus right in asserting itself. It is thus right in
destroying that which is not right. Nothing is produced, no one is cured,
the economy is not improved by the means of sayings, cliches or tragedies.
The variety of lizards, ferns or ants which will tomorrow cover the earth is
the rational variety. I hope to die before I live in a world that will only
speak reason. For a life that would be always and everywhere nothing but
rational is not liveable.
It is therefore reasonable to be reasonably wary of the rational. We are
not judging the merits (acknowledged), the grandeur (admitted), the effec-
tiveness (a thousand times proved), the value, in sum, of science; we are
worried about its victories for fear of one day being under its complete
domination. No matter how correct a theory may be, it becomes odious
when it reigns alone.
Literature, in its broadest sense, has become the legacy of the poor, in
a new sense. Science is on the side of power, on the side of effectiveness; it
has and will have more and more credit, more intellectual and social
legitimacy, and the best positions in government; it will attract strong
minds-strong in reason and ambition; it will take up space. Science has
chased away, is chasing away, and will chase away what it calls idle talk,
until it has cleaned up the place where it alone reigns and will reign. The
poets will be driven from town, reduced to recounting, after dinner, a few
poorly-conceived stories to a population overwhelmed by serious work
based on science. Literature will be the legacy of the debilitated, emptied of
all power.
The legacy of the poor-without legitimacy, without reason, without
the fascinated consideration that reason effortlessly attracts from the pub-
lic. Letters, the humanities, and literature will henceforth attract only soft
minds, too feeble to shine in the realm of sciences; literature is dying
surrounded by tearful invalids who are laughingstocks. It is the legacy of
the poor, of the pauper who is perhaps actually a victim of extortion or
exploitation, but also and especially of the pauper in terms of rights, of the
pauper in spirit. Such a person does not know how to demonstrate, mea-
sure or count, does not know how to to manipulate, does not speak the
Literature and the Exact Sciences 5

right languages, does not present credentials to any power whatsoever.

Reason has no need of paupers; power has no need of songs. The cultured
man, formerly called I'honnbte homme, is a sort of savage, the last of the
Mohicans; he guards ruined temples. It is not the jungle that will invade
temples and cathedrals, beneath the raucous laughter of monkeys; it is the
rationalization of space that will will raze them.

Three portraits. The savage cultivator of the soil is followed in the

distance by the agronomist, who pushes the forest back with his work. The
former disappears from the surface of the earth, before the order of the
furrows, before the selection and raising of rare and chosen breeds. The
agronomist cedes his place to the biochemist. This process, which is per-
haps history, indicates that history eliminates savagery. He's obviously a
savage, that cultivator of the forest. We understand today that this move-
ment must impose limits-wise boundaries-on itself. The primitive forest
is a reserve, a stock of species or essences from which, once upon a time,
our agriculture and our animal husbandry came-even if we have forgot-
ten from what wild plant wheat was born. History must not eradicate its
origins, for fear of depriving itself of an eventual resource. No one can
foresee tomorrow's needs.
Science dwells in fields; it thinks in an orderly and compartmentalized
way. It knows the variety that it is working on, and that alone. It stores its
harvest away at the end of the season; it has little memory. The cultured
man frequents the woods, he is on the side of the savages-he has the
intuition of the complex, he distinguishes circumstances, he is a man of
experience, he is old. He is poor (the other is rich); he deceives himself and
can admit it (the other has his head high and clear); he is drowned in the
multiplicity of mixtures, he does not have all his consciousness, does not
perceive how he perceives; he is crafty, the other is naive. But effective.
"You scientific types," says that cultured man, "you will always be chil-
dren. A scientist is never old, he does not have our memory that has been
bleached by time. Remember the child Thketete, scarcely having left his
theorem, brought back dying from battle; the child Pascal dead when
scarcely adult; the child Abel, buried in oblivion; the child Carnot dead,
insane at the home of Esquirol; the child Gallois, killed in a duel for the
love of a beautiful bitch; the child Bourbaki, stillborn. Science eats wheat
when it is newly sprung up; science is green and always near its origins.
We others have survived the fall of Troy and the oblivion of Antiquity, the
6 Michel Serres

extinction of languages and the death of God." Everyone hears the inter-
minable dialogue between the amnesic child and the old man with mem-
ories, who pleads with the former to let him continue to live.

I am seeking a knowledge that is finally adult, a balanced wisdom, a

certain forgetfulness of death. It is not a bad thing to place oneself on the
verge of my picture, where wildness begins, and where knowledge begins.
Places of transition are always fecund.
The adult man is educated in a third way. Agronomist and man of the
woods, savage and tiller of the fields, he has both culture and science. This
is why he has understood for so long that the endangered stocks are the
reserves of science, and that to destroy them would be to deprive ourselves
of invention.
The step undertaken here is thus not simply one of explanation; its
goal is more than to reveal another form of criticism. Criticism is fairly
futile-nly invention counts. This so-called adult knowledge is convinced
and certain that the picture described above is full of sense. It would like,
therefore, to convince us that these reserves of language are not humanity's
past, but rather, quite often, the future of the sciences, the unexplored
region of future inventions.

A bit of history or overview. If scientific theories and results predate

the literary work under consideration, which is the usual and uninteresting
case-a case of latterliness-the one imitates or copies the other, quite
simply. I have chosen a sonnet by Sponde to illustrate this case of imitation;
decoding it is not at all difficult. If one knows something about the state of
knowledge of the time, it becomes quite obvious. If Diderot, Balzac, Zola-
if others had never worked on anything but such an importation of the
already-thought-they would have rapidly lost that which animates them;
they would have conceived the mortal sadness of Bouvard and Pkcuchet:
copying.
Theories or results can be contemporary to a work; one can even bring
this example to perfection by choosing a single author-a writer of prose
and a geometrician, for example. Pascal writes from a fixed point, both
physical and religious-it's a nice case of identity. I wish that his case
would become more generalized-in order to avoid stupidity and division,
Literature and the Exact Sciences 7

adverse ignorance-and that it would become a pedagogical model. All

cases in which science comes after a literary work are interesting-they
give a different perspective on so-called imaginative works. In every area,
imagination strikes the first blow; reason-method and rigor-is always
second. Invention takes place everywhere, especially where one does not
expect it. Therefore I have taken four examples from the dreamlike realm,
the mythical realm, the so-called imaginary realm, and from the realm of
sleep. La Fontaine, Diderot, Zola, and Verlaine, immersed in areas where
science officially has no place, develop intuitions that I can only call scien-
tific inventions. They anticipate from afar the gesture, the thought, the
system of the scientist. Yes, literature is resource for science.

A Case of Imitation: L'Eau Solide

Tout s'enfle contre moy, tout m'assaut, tout me tente,

Et le Monde, et la chair, et l'ange revolt6,
Dont l'onde, dont l'effort, dont le charme invent6
Et m'abysme, Seigneur, et m'esbranle, et m'enchante,
Quelle nef, quel appuy, quelle oreille dormante,
Sans peril, sans tomber, et sans estre enchant&
Me donras-tu? Ton Temple otI vit ta Saintete,
Ton invincible main, et ta voix si constante.
Et quoy? mon Dieu, je sens combattre maintesfois
Encor avec ton Temple, et ta main et ta voix,
Cest Ange revolt& ceste chair, et ce Monde.
Mais ton Temple pourtant, ta main, ta voix sera
La nef, l'appuy, l'oreille, oh ce charme perdra,
Oh mourra cest effort, otI se rompra ceste onde.

It's obvious how to read the double entries of Sponde's best-known

sonnet: triple repetitions in each line, reprise and variation of one of the
three from verse to verse. Hence the rectangular matrix:
8 Michel Serres

The term enchante or enchant6 is repeated in the quatrains, and 2, = 2,.

Lines 7 and 8 are actually one, and line 9 is exterior to the tableau. The
tercets, in the end, add nothing new, except identities or inversions. The
arrangement is not a simple matrix, with two regular indices.
One counts twelve verses and only twenty words, since z6 = 2., Three is
the most apparent number, a constant everywhere and even outside the
tableau, for example in the Trinity with a capital T: Seigneur, ta Saintete, mon
Dim. The permutated ensemble, at the bottom of the matrix, is reduced to
five lines. Twelve, twenty, three, five--one can go no further on the syntax
of the system, so let us move on to history and semantics.

Sponde was a Hellenist who translated the poems of Homer and knew
Plato in detail. The learned reproach him for not knowing Aristotle; the
blessed sixteenth century did this somewhat intentionally. The platonic
gospel, in those days when one loved the world for the simple reason that
it was beautiful, was none other than the Timeus. Again, the sonnet cited
only repeats elements by a tripartite analysis of Tout ("everything"), itself
repeated three times in the first line. This Tout, outside of the tableau, but
generator of the tableau, is called le Monde ("the w o r l d ) in x,, and le Monde
is reduced to l'onde ("the wave") in x,. Finally, the poem ends with this
onde, and with this paradox, sufficient to wake us up: that the wave will
break. But what can break, except a solid?
Hence the physics or chemistry or geometry of the Timeus. The five
regular or solid platonic polyhedrons correspond to the four elements and
to the Tout, water to the icosahedron and le Monde to the dodecahedron
Literature and the Exact Sciences 9

with pentagonal faces. All of that is possible, the difference and the unity
of bodies, because the first elements are triangles. Fluid polyhedrons (e.g.
fire, air and water) with triangular faces that can be broken down into two
times three triangles, resolve themselves into elementary figures and re-
form new polyhedrons, eventually different. Thus l'onde breaks into tripartite
figures because it is a solid, a regular icosahedron. And the Tout, in the
same way, though more resistant: the dodecahedron-Monde.
Consider now l'eau solide: the icosahedron has twelve angles, twenty
surfaces; each one of these has three sides, each angle brings together five
edges. Twelve, twenty, three, five-the numbers of the sonnet are the
numbers of the wave. The interest of the count doubles when one knows
that a complex game of symmetries and repetitions allows one to pass from
the icosahedron to the dodecahedron-that is from l'onde to le monde, and
reciprocally-the numbers all remain constant. The pentagonal dodecahe-
dron, Monde or Tout, has twelve surfaces and twenty angles; each one of
these brings together three edges, and each surface has five sides. Twelve,
twenty, three, five-the numbers of the sonnet are the numbers of Ie monde.
Finally the only number missing from the count is common, precisely, to
both bodies, without symmetry or inversion: the two solids, eau and monde,
have respectively thirty edges. Now this number is absent both from the
Hellenic dialogue and from Sponde's sonnet. For this very reason it is
thought that Plato or Timeus missed the usual topological invariants. The
roll call is complete; the roll of absences is confirmatory.
One has only to make variations to complete the demonstration. The
ninth verse is an element of symmetry. The first time, it's a question of le
Monde. By the time you have counted to twenty in z7 -in other words,
when you have covered the angles of the dodecahedron, and if you have
repeated the last elements, discerning the entire body shining through-
the elements across from these and which correspond to these are per-
mutated by rotation. This is the first tercet. The second time, it is a question
of l'onde. By the time you have counted to twenty in q,-in other words
when you have covered the angles of the icosahedron, and if you have
repeated the elements, discerning the entire body shining through-the
triangle in front has a corresponding, inverted triangle in the back, the
angle where the side is, the side where the angle is. This is the second
tercet. The sonnet, one sees, is thus quite finished. The last third of the
count is each time a reprise of each key word about le solide and inverts the
verse where it is introduced.
10 Michel Serres

The text is Greek through and through; it is, however, Christian-it is

a prayer. It is Greek by le Tout, le Monde, water, the triad and the numbers;
Greek by presence, absence, variations, symmetries. Solid like a temple and
like a polyhedron. Greek in causing to rhyme, in unvarying numbers, onde
and monde. Icosahedron and dodecahedron correspond, in stable and ex-
changed numbers, by the partitions of their circumscribed sphere. Har-
mony and music of the spheres-Kepler and others discerned this constant
voice with an ear, I believe, that was not dormant. The voice of the world
and of things, geometric logos and religious verb. Religious by the god
who creates balance, measure, number; mathematics incarnates itself in
flesh and matter. As much in the Timeus as in the oath of Pappus, on these
same subjects: "I swear to you, whoever you are, that I declare God to be
unique as to species but not as to number, who made the heavens and the
earth, the tetrad of the elements and the things which emanate from them,
who has allied our souls endowed with reason to bodies, who is carried on
the chariots of the cherubim and praised by a host of angels." Here is the
body, here is the flesh, here are the angels. Yes, by polyhedrons, I can
accomplish nothing.
The dodecahedron monde-prelude to the twelve concentric spheres-
and the icosahedron onde, but also the flesh, earth, and again the air where
the angels circulate and where the sound waves fly-are subject to dissolu-
tion. Assault, effort, weakening and fall. Solids break up, decompose into
triangles. The sonnet spells death by disassembling into three the dimen-
sions introduced. Solids are in danger of destruction. Plato is undone by
triangulation, then Christianity is rebuilt with the Trinity. Hence the inver-
sion of Hellenism, upon the element of symmetry, but in the retained
Greek space: the triad at the end of degeneration and corruption becomes
the unity of the Trinity, the promise of eternity: Seigneur, ta Saintetk, mon
Dieu. The solid world is the Temple where it lives, invincible and constant.
This is a sonnet of immortality. In Greek: the Tout was le monde, and le
monde was l'onde. In Christianity: le monde is the temple, and the temple is
the nave. Hence the inversion: I'onde is the nave itself, death of death and
of mortal effort. And the voice is the ear.
This family of inversions, triad-Trinity, temporal solids-invincible
temples, wave-nave, death-eternity, voice-ear, is evident in the body under
consideration by symmetry or assymetry, rotation or permutation; it sig-
nifies a Christianity which turns Greek thought upside-down, but which
retains its representative space.
Literature and the Exact Sciences 11

A Case of Identity: The Fixed Point

The best possible case, and easiest, is that of Pascal. He is surely the
keenest of the French classical scientists, the deepest and the broadest-
from number theory to the study of weights-and not the worst of the
prose-writers. He belongs to literature, he honors the history of science,
and those who do not count him in the history of philosophy dishonor
themselves. I do not see how his thought or his prose could be understood
without a minimum of references to his scientific invention. The man who
has understood some theorems on conic sections does not think in the
common way; some movement brings him back to them. The man who has
understood differentials or demonstrations by maximum does not reason
in the ordinary way. It is not the same adventure to read the Penskes or the
other Opuscules, not to mention the Provinciales, without taking into ac-
count his texts on geometry or mechanics. When he wrote the former, he
knew the latter. I'm not saying that everything in them is explicable by
these; I'm saying that one misses many things when one doesn't follow the
same route as the author. Blessed time when the wise or adroit investigator
was also a theologian, blessed culture in which numbers were the com-
panions of thoughts on amusement, blessed time when, on the other side
of the English Channel, the great Newton spent the brightest part of his life
doing works of alchemy. In the same way that certain members of certain
savage ethnicities believe themselves obliged to tie their left hand to their
body and immobilize it in order to give greater honor to their right hand
and render it unique in attending to work, hunting, leisure, games-so
those who love reason force themselves (no doubt out of religion) to para-
lyze everything in their thinking that is not certain, factual, and formal
reason. They are the savages of this age, but they reign over the age. At the
same time Pascal, and Newton as well, did not think themselves dis-
honored in praying to the God of Abraham or in chasing the Green Lion.
The paradox is admirable: on one side of the Channel, they forget the
alchemic papers of the "inventor" of universal gravity, to the point of
dispersing them; they lose them shamelessly, they do not want Newton as
he lived and thought. On this side of the Channel, they ignore the scientific
papers of the author of the Pensies, they omit them out of incomprehen-
sion, or they leave them to the historians of science, who in turn abandon
the Penskes. The professors teach only the right half of the one, and the left
half of the other; our culture and our teaching form hemiplegics. I propose
that we think by means of both hemispheres of our organ of thinking; I
propose that we live and speak and write from a unified body. These
12 Michel Serres

exclusions and divisions are rooted in a prehistoric anthropology of the

body. We are scandalized by sexual excisions, and we find hemiplegia of
thought normal and healthy. The least we can d o is to finally let go of those
archaic religions of paralysis, those primitive rites of repression.
Thus the raison des effets and the other pensees sur le point d e
representation quickly seem incomprehensible or inexplicable when con-
sidered together, if one has not understood or analyzed together the great
results obtained on numbers and on figures. The clearest method, the most
profound synthesis, as well as the simplest and most defendable expres-
sion on the subject of representation, is found in the seventeenth century in
arithmetic and geometry, especially in differential calculus, but also in
mechanical experimentation itself and in optics. In abandoning this whole
body of work one exposes oneself to ignorance or to comical nonsense; one
is obliged to construct an immense methodological machine that is harder
to understand than any clarification it provides-while there exists, right at
hand, already built by the hand itself of the author, limpid and lucid tools
that explain the greatest amount possible with the least amount of effort.
To be understood consists in saying less but more clearly, certainly not in
saying more and less clearly. The body of work of the exact sciences, in
Pascal and elsewhere, is always condensed, transparent; it permits an econ-
omy that is the elegance of thought.
I return to the left hand, or to the shadow of right-handed reason. The
left hand complements the right, surely, if one wants to work easily; but
since, at the level of the nervous system, it is linked by chiasma to the right
side, the left hand is as though interior to the right hand as well as'being its
complement, its opposite, its exterior. I am only partially speaking in im-
ages. Everything takes place as though nonscientific reason were internal
to science at the same time that it remains exterior; everything takes place
as though science is waiting in stones and myths at the same time that it is
in conflict with them. I have seen in my life as many shadows in certain
lights as I have perceived lights in the shadows; I have detected as much
myth in the sciences as true knowledge in myths; I have been taken aback
by the ignorance and folly of so-called scientific philosophy, I have read
science in literature that was like sleep-inducing stories. As with the hand,
the chiasma is contemporary to the opposition; science as an institution
does not conduct itself differently than a church, while it chases away all
churches. Twin brothers who fight each other came from the same uterus,
and that is obvious.
The body of hard science produced by Pascal can help to explain the
body of other texts by its simplicity of expression and its conceptual clarity;
Literature and the Exact Sciences 13

inversely, the results of the former are crisscrossed with intentions, with
the meditative passion of the latter. Pascal is searching for the fixed point
in numbers, in figures, in movements and weights, and he finds it in the
same way that he searches for Jesus Christ-as though he has already
found him.'

Invention, Fables

"Parasite" designates a virus, a small living thing which lives in a host

organism and feeds off its body. It designates, also, a guest who uses and
abuses the taMe and shelter of an &erg2te, of a patron or, more simply, of a
generous man, and who pays back in glibness what he receives in nourish-
ment. More recently, in the French language, "parasite" designates noise
that intercepts the passage of a message in a channel of communication.
There is a single operator for three people or a single person for three
operations. His work, their work, makes understandable the evolution,
swift or slow, of certain physical, living, or social systems. A crystal full of
impurities does not have the same properties as a pure body; the para-
sitized organism, if it is not dead, resists better than the sterile body; the
history of groups is quite often that of these parasites. Today neither the
hard sciences nor the so-called human sciences, nor even technology or
industry, misunderstand this kind of operator. Hereafter one can even
conceive of him in the abstract. One can wonder if an age of evolution, of
any kind of transformation, is thinkable without him.
For the person nourished by stories or fables, this theory is not a great
invention. The apologue of the City Rat and the Country Rat says it ex-
pressly, in La Fontaine, by means of an economy of language close to
abstract theory. Many of the Fables say it again, carefully varying the con-
tent and the circumstances; they evaluate the worth of language with res-
pect to life, to death, to fear and to food, to the place of the interceptor in
the collective network. They reveal-as Moli&re'sTartuffe also, as the Odys-
sey earlier, and as Rousseau's Confessions later-that the element of the
relationship between us is not the double-headed arrow on which pass, in
both directions, signals and things, words and goods, benedictions, greet-
ings, threats or blows, merchandise-but is very precisely a simple arrow
which goes in one direction and refuses to come back, a semi-conductor.
Abuse is there, well before use and exchange. This arrowhead embeds
itself in systems, and makes them change or risk the death penalty.
14 Michel Serres

What we call literature has revealed, for a good long time, that un-
analyzable element which is to relations what particles could be to inert
matter, what the individual is to the group, and the monad to philosophy.
The advance-the anticipation on the part of the fable, of the myth, of the
popular or picaresque story--on the positive construction of the sciences is
here m~ltisecular.~
One sees therein how literature is the reserve of the sciences, in some-
what the same way that the primitive forest is the reserve of essences-
withdrawn, selected by the cultivator and the agronomist. If we do not
educate our scientists in the third approach to knowledge, the risk of their
destroying the reserve upon which they rely is enormous.

Invention, Images

The science fiction novel is not what we think. When it foresees, when
it is ahead of science and its time, the novelist usually doesn't know it. He
doesn't deliberately will it. Conversely, when he decides it and wishes it,
he has no prescience-he invents hot air. Nothing has ever come out of
science fiction novels which has benefitted science. But consider the case of
Verne, or of Zola. When Jules Verne actually speaks of science, of the
movement of the heavenly bodies, of crystallography or of electricity, he is
behind by one or two centuries; he is never up on the work or the inven-
tions of his time. He thinks in the style of Auguste Comte or Laplace, while
writing in the age of Boltzmann. In contrast, when Jules Verne dreams,
when he gives himself over unabashedly to the internal dynamic of the
story or the myth, he constructs a very precise world, a coherent and
unitary world of communication. He is one jump ahead on local techniques
and very much ahead on their synthesis. The global world that he presents
is already our world-that is, the place where every location is accessible.
He is behind the times when he voluntarily and consciously imitates
science; conversely, he is in the forefront when he gives himself up to the
logic of the associated dream. Jules Verne lives in the time of Prometheus,
but he anticipates the era of Hermes. While his knowledge is stiff and
out-of-date, his imagination is in top form.3
Imagination in science as in literature always breaks new ground. If
you want to save science, lose it; if you want to lose it, save it-this is the
only methodological rule.
It is the same with Emile Zola. He is au courant of the science of his
time; he writes a genealogy supported by genetics. But this is not interest-
Literature and the Exact Sciences 15

ing, neither for himself, nor the reader, nor the critic. What he gets from the
physiologists, his contemporaries, is paltry-paltry as far as knowledge
goes and in comparison to the writing where he is carried away by myth.
When Zola speaks consciously and conscientiously about science, myth
carries him away. But science also carries him to the end of the line of
myth.
At the end of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, Dr. Pascal, who is of the
lineage but who, making that lineage the object of his study, is not of
it-although he irrevocably is-reflects on genetics and geneology. Scien-
tific knowledge is in the story, and the story is in scientific knowledge. The
doctor says what he thinks about life, about reproduction, about health,
sickness, degeneration. We recognize a bit in passing the card-index of the
author, or the spirit of the age. Now all that is said explicitly therein is
fairly false or fairly weak when judged by scientific knowledge and the
history of scientific knowledge-vague, imprecise, sententious. In the same
way, we hear Jules Verne hold forth politely on the resistance of materials;
in the same way, we skim over it, hastily. But it's not necessary to abandon
the story; the scientific knowledge in the story is already dusty when the
story of the scientific knowledge is in the mind of the storyteller. Every-
thing that is narrated peripherally-the house, the office, the sun, the
drawers, the niece's drawings--everything that reveals imprecise science
-the setting, the details, the circumstances, the so-to-speak freehand
drawing, the whole world created around the sententious discourse-is
entirely the work of the novelist himself, and is of a rare, learned powerful-
ness when judged by the standards of science and the history of science-
precision, exactitude, rigor, authenticity, foresight.
True knowledge, prescience, or what is nowadays called science fic-
tion finds itself displaced from rote-style science, displaced in the direction
of quasi-naive writings, in the direction of nonscientific images. That which
is labelled "serious," "documented," or "factual" is soon out-of-date, a bit
ridiculous, even, while fiction is scientific knowledge anticipated, already
in place, well-placed in our science, a science that has remained stable for a
century. Zola makes discoveries; he makes discoveries as a scientist
through his work as a novelist, simply by the means of literary repre-
sentation, through the imagination. He discovers the true future state of
genetic questions; he invents our way of questioning life. Neither the scien-
tists of his time nor the philosophers had discovered these things before
him.
Le Docteur Pascal is a fiery story set in a single place-sunny Soulbiade.
The economics of the tale are entirely calculable or countable in the lan-
16 Michel Serres

guage of heat, in the terminology of energy and power. It's not hard to
meticulously list and add up the calculations and the count. They fall into
place in a marvelous way, they offer sidelights on transformations and
movements, they furnish a summing-up. The scientific knowledge in the
story is not very well situated in scientific knowlege in general, nor in that
of the times, but the story expresses contemporary thermodynamics as well
as contemporary thermodynamic theory does-even better than it does-
being better situated than it, between the question of exchanges and the
problem of life. The story anticipates the development of thermodynamics
as a discipline, and its philosophical influence on all other areas of knowl-
edge. This is expressed in terms of rooms, closets, drawers, papers, money,
doors, windows, cracks-it makes no difference-it is expressed in terms
of the truth. In the same way that the dated ideas of Pascal are illustrated
either figuratively or through images in the story, the science of life and of
the reproduction of the living, far from being isolated or suspended as
though independent, is linked to the physics of the exchange of energy. In
putting genetics and physiology in a novel, Zola puts them exactly in the
place where they become intelligible-in the place where research in the
course of his story puts them, in the place where they are. It is a great
discovery.
This was not Zola's goal. It is, however, his creative achievement-
ahead of its time, hidden, manifest. The creative achievement does not
consist of intuition, as is often the case, but of work, in the consistent and
stubborn following of a line of inquiry. We have an idea of what the line of
inquiry is, but not of where it will lead. Zola knows the line-the thread-
but he also knows the weave, the thickness of the material. He studies life,
the science of life, and he also studies the times in which this science is
situated, the society in which it is manifested. Good history of science does
not always consist of studying science, but of its context. The rkcit rouge of
the Rougons becomes warm and burning in the innards of la Bite hurnaine.
The secret of life was perhaps in the inner workings of the Lison, in the
disassembled furnace. What biologists did not yet fully know, the novelist
had already learned from the steam engine. In so doing, Zola invents,
literally.
Invention is the only true intellectual act, the only intelligent action.
The rest is copying, cheating, disloyalty, laziness, conventionality. Inven-
tion is the only proof that one truly thinks the thing one thinks, no matter
what that is. I think, therefore I invent. I invent, therefore I think. The only
proof that a scientist is exercising his science is that he invents. Lack of
invention proves, by counterproof, the absence of works and of thought.
Literature and the Exact Sciences 17

He who does not invent is working elsewhere than in the realm of intel-
ligence.
The only proof that a historian of science really thinks the history of
science is that he invents in the sciences of which he speaks, or in the
circumstances on which they depend. He shows thereby that he is follow-
ing the right lead in knowledge. The only proof that a story which presents
scientific knowledge accurately presents accurate science is that it invents
within or around the scientific information. The proof that Flaubert gave
us, in Bouvard et Pkcuchet, of the true and worthy history of science is not in
the hugeness of his cardfile, in the serious, dreary length of his studies, nor
in the faithfulness of the copy, but in the invention of the stupidity of the
professionalized scientist, the genial prescience of his lack of education, the
exact foresight of what would happen, paradoxically, in the society of the
future: how intellectual work makes the intelligence stupid again. The
instability of his two puppets sterilizes them as much as the fixed classifica-
tions of institutions. The proof that Zola, in spite of the great blunders he
often commits, gives us here and there in le Docteur Pascal an excellent
history of science is this invention, this anticipation of the exact place
where the question of life will be asked: the fire goes out, it burns down
and grows cold again, life progresses, it rises up, the child of an ignorant
virgin is the Messiah, life transcends death (death by fire-the alcoholic
uncle immolates himself in short, blue flames)-life resurrects, life is pas-
chal, life revives entropy. Zola tells us in his own way that one must choose
between Darwin and Carnot, between creative evolution and growing en-
tropy. No one had expressed it before him; perhaps no one will ever say it
better than he did. No one under the Sun.
There are two reasons why no one says it better. The first is trivial and
has just been said-Zola was following the right lead in science when he
thought of dramatizing it. The second is that the theoretical content in the
story ends at Soul6iade-in the fire and the sun-because the story has
already at great length passed through fire, especially in the belly of the
Lison. Zola sees and describes the overheated society that grew out of the
Industrial Revolution, the multiple crowds which feed the motor of the
great department stores, the motor of the locomotive that transports the
crowds, the great conflagration of Paris which follows the DeZdcle and
which is the Dkbdcle itself. The model of the motor is built little by little in
the cycle of the stories; the motor starts to hum, it starts to produce, to
explain; it becomes inventive, it is there, right alongside life, and theory
suddenly must absorb this proximity. In so doing, Zola touches all the
aspects of culture that in turn touch science. Zola touches an inchoate
18 Michel Serres

closeness to scientific knowledge, and in so doing, touches invention,

again. He takes as his subject the working classes who are and will be,
under different names, the chosen main object of ~cience.~
Even better, the pathways of invention include recognizing the subter-
ranean place that carries and advances clear understanding. Science that is
pure and distinct and cut off will only be sterile-it will have lost all
fecundity. It will be virginal, angelic, parthenogenetic. Science has its feet
on the ground-in the ground-if it has its head in the clouds. It is not cut,
meaning neutered. It has never truly let go of its adherence to other modes
of thought. Certainly neither Verne nor Zola, despite their scientific preoc-
cupations, ever let go of myths or religious history. But neither Pascal the
theologian nor Newton the alchemist nor Einstein the pantheist were neu-
tered scientists. Science does not move forward alone; if so, it would be the
only thing to reproduce itself or to progress without external exchanges,
the only thing to propagate itself by perpetual motion. Without other
aspects of culture, science--cut off, axenic, anemic-will dry up. It will
become nothing more than a dream.

Invention: Dream

The word "dream" is not devoid of meaning, in the sense that it was
used by Diderot in Le R h e dfAlembert.The story is about a scientist, one of
the greatest in Europe in those times; it is obviously about science; it is not
about science. About philosophy? The term is too conveniently broad.
D'Alembert sleeps, he talks in his sleep, agitated, feverish. Those around
him are anxious; one would say in the expression of my region that il
diparle--he misspeaks, he beats around the bush. Now and then science
slumbers. There is nothing left of it today, or almost nothing-what a
surprise-there remains its dream.
The story traverses the clear consciousness of science; it continues to
speak when the rational voice is silent. Thus, in the involution of sleep, we
still produce images, symbols, words, quasi-stories, when speech that is
adapted to reality (or controlled by it) is silent. In the same way that there
exists in us a voice that is out of synch with the main voice, or these images
that are freed from the control of perception-in the same way, a voice
emanates from science that is not its own (ordinary, ordered)--an imaged
world that is not entirely its own. As though there existed an unconscious
side of scientific knowledge, as though the imagination that was well-be-
haved in its daily tasks were unleashing its madness and playing its games.
Literature and the Exact Sciences 19

Here science loses its controls, its cerebral, linguistic and social controls; it
drops the traces of rhetoric; it abandons dignity of expression; it seems to
rediscover the humus of invention. Scientific language and the scientific
community are the censors of science. Get beyond them and you will
dream; get beyond them and you will invent; but you will be alone.
The parallel is easy to follow--even too simple-the way is already
paved for it. Suddenly I have an inner revolt against it. This state of affairs
is an indignity. Diderot seems to liberate d'Alembert while he imprisons
forever our idea of science; he seems to discover a productive unconscious
in science, but he pushes it into the shadows of sleep. This division, begun
in classical times between a science awake by day and a non-science
dreaming in the shadows of the night, achieves its consummation here. The
Age of Enlightenment that we have learned to celebrate as an age of libera-
tion is perhaps only an episode in the history of science. It is the end of a
struggle and the beginning of a total victory. Of all the burgeoning fields of
knowledge, science alone stands out, usurps power-usurps it permanent-
ly, as we know today. Then it assimilates enlightenment: it alone sees, it
alone illuminates. The rest is nothing but shadows. It usurps the metaphors
of religious revelation, it seizes the metaphors of mystical discourse. Light
of light, truth, it shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended
it not, received it not. It alone develops in the clear light of day, awake, a
working presence in the world. All other forms of thought are only dreams
to be driven back into the night, into obscurity, into delirium or madness.
The fact that all discourse not sealed with the approval of science strikes us
as "irrational" is the result of this victory-a social, discursive, and at the
same time, ideological victory. The place of science in the scheme of things
is ideological. Science alone tells what is perceived and what should be
perceived, dictates experience, truth, rigor, exactitude, fidelity to the real,
efficiency, the foreseeable; it alone possesses the word-who can speak,
henceforth, against science? Science has stolen reason. What is said of
anyone today aspiring to reason outside of science? Even d'Alembert, the
greatest scientist in Europe-mechanic, algebraist, analyst-is only dream-
ing when he philosophizes and tells stories. Let's forget Newton the al-
chemist, let's disperse the papers in which he pursues the Green Lion, let's
say that Auguste Comte becomes crazy when he turns to sociology. Science
takes the day, it leaves darkness to other discourses; it has seized the
awakening, the sun, like the king in bygone days, or some god in former
times; it has pushed everything else into the realm of dreams. It has the
stamp of approval, the only credentialed seal. Dreams are no longer any-
thing but the return of what has been repressed, the language of defeat. As
20 Michel Serres

heirs of this division-crushing though justified, tyrannical, and undoub-

tedly definitive-we see today that if a scientist speaks, he makes head-
lines, even when he spouts the worst stupidities, outside his own realm of
experience; we scarcely listen to the dreams of those who are not stamped
with the scientific seal.
This division, accepted as evidence, is only one-sided. It strongly re-
sembles those divisions of territory at the end of great battles where the
victor takes everything, leaving only vanquished miserable reserves and
strange, savage speech. The descendants then forget the battle and the
dignity of the vanquished-the eminent dignity of the poor vanquished.
They are no longer indignant. Now, the battle was mighty and the victor,
ordinarily, abusive. The war was on a large scale; we no longer remember
it. The total victory is in the hands of the scientific community; all other
groups are mere shadows. Science alone will not dream. The Republic of
the spirits needs no other language. We are imprisoned by this vision-
awakening and dream, day, night, shadow and light-by this religious
vision par excellence, simplistic and dualistic, Manichean. Hence the
theories of division, of the two languages, the two cultures, the research for
criteria. Surprise, surprise-all of our intelligent work, our scrupulously
lucid and reasonable work, is covered with an armor of stupid rigidity and
archaic superstition.
Each side has lost out in this split, where the uncontrolled dream is
placed in opposition to work done when fully awake; science has lost every
bit as much as it has rejected. Soon the prejudged discourses of the realm
of dreams will no longer have a place in the sun, no matter what they say;
at the same time the most idiotic discourses will seek out the approval of
science in order to spread themselves widely about.
And when only millions of lizards exist on the face of the earth, the
lizards too will have lost their vital reserves.

Invention: Sleep

Seeker, if you need to find something, read the discours de me'thode or

the treatises on epistemology-you will be told, learnedly, what invention
is. Take courses in the history of the sciences.
If you have something or someone to hide, either shameful or pre-
cious, three solutions are possible. You can put the object or person in a
place or a box-the darkest and most confining-that you lock up. That
was Cain's solution, and Victor Hugo's-the solution of the grave. The
Literature and the Exact Sciences 21

presence of the box, of the lock on the box, immediately alerts the seeker,
the thief, the spy, to the hidden treasure. There is no strongbox that can
resist any concerted effort to open it. The thief is immediately God and the
dark box is illuminated as soon as he can find it. It would have been better
if, after killing Abel, Cain had continued to wander, indefinitely. The eye is
immediately drawn to the grave, if Cain is buried in it.
The second solution is the reverse of the first one. It is the solution of
Edgar Allan Poe: that which must be concealed is in plain sight. This
solution is equally naive, except that it has the advantage of not immedi-
ately drawing the attention of the spy, the police, or God to the hiding
place-to the vase of roses. The seeker is obliged to wander a bit. In the
case of the purloined letter, the detective does not wander for long, since
the obvious place is not far from the home of the receiver of stolen goods,
from his stronghold.
The third hiding place is natural-in Nature. Poe suggested it some-
what. The forest hides the tree in the midst of the trees, in plain sight
among the others; the haystack hides and reveals the little wisps of hay
among the millions of wisps. One would have needed millions of letters to
hide the purloined letter truly in plain sight. The digit is only a digit
because of the immense, inaccessible number of digits. That's the code.
What is called science is often a sort of decoding imposed by this situation.
Into it go immense collections, groups, multiplicities, large numbers, large
populations.

L'espoir luit comme un brin de paille dans l'etable.

Que crains-tu de la guepe ivre de son vol fou?
Vois, le soleil toujours poudroie quelque trou.
Que ne tfendormais-tu,le coude sur la table?
Pauvre ame pale, au moins cette eau du puits glace,
Bois-lh. Puis dors apres. Allons, tu vois, je reste,
Et je dorloterai les reves de ta sieste,
Et tu chantonneras comme un enfant berck.
Midi sonne. De grace, eloignez-vous, madame.
I1 dort. C'est ktonnant comme les pas de femme
Rksonnent au cerveau des pauvres malheureux.
Midi sonne. J'ai fait arroser dans la chambre.
Va, dors! L'espoir luit comme un caillou dans un creux
Ah, quand refleuriront les roses de septembre!
22 Michel Serres

The simplest case is that of the same body, the same author, the same
name-Pascal produced only a single work, not two-he produced it with
two hands. The most difficult case, at the end of the road, is the most
interesting, difficult to trace, rare, stunning-it's science fiction. I'm not
talking about recent works classed under this name and often mediocre; I
mean the sudden bursts of intuition that appear in ordinary passages, the
pools of prescience, the pockets of science infused in peak moments of
literature. How else to explain Verlaine's dream in the famous sonnet
"Sagesse": "L'espoir luit comme un brin de paille dans 1'6table"? In the
same way that Le RCve dlAlemberf is without any doubt a false dream,
affected, artificial, anticipating extrapolation along the current scientific
lines-in the same way that L'Eve future by Villier de l'Isle Adam con-
sciously assumes recognized techniques-so Verlaine here obviously ig-
nores and sees, half-asleep, with his elbow on the table, in the crushing
heat of the day, at the hour of the meridional siesta, his feet in the cool
puddles of water used to wash down the tiled floor. He falls asleeps and
dreams, he descends gently in the background noise of coenesthesia, from
which "reasonable" life vertically separates itself.
The background noise before music, before language: the background
noise that listening hears in listening, when the head falls into the well of
sleep, the hand on the ear-the sound of the world and of all its rightful
organs together, the background noise before rhythm, before the woman's
steps are heard, resonates in the brain. The background noise, hubbub or
brouhaha before any signal-we carry it within ourselves without ever
hearing it, because we are alive and life burns, like the calm and crazy
flame that unites and prolongs the body-not at all organized or structured
like a language, which is why there is this redundant intensification, buzz-
ing like disorder, and clamoring like chaos. Verlaine writes in the back-
ground noise, its myriad acouophonics and its kaleidoscope of images, of
phosphenes, afterimages. Better than science, better than prescience-
truly, what exact science describes first of all the position and state of the
observer? Here is knowledge armed with its related exact science, with its
conditions of knowing.
Background noise is born of the multiple, or is the pure multiple in
vibrant proximity to rousing, to sleep, to awakening, to sleepiness-it is an
undulating field. Like the myriad wisps of hay in the hayloft; like the
myriad of bees, of wasps, of flies, vibrating and humming in their hazard-
ous flight; like millions of particles of dust dancing in a ray of sunlight
coming through a hole in a door.
Literature and the Exact Sciences 23

You can always find a needle in a haystack, if you have the time and
the patience, and a yearning for the lost needle. Not much chance, though,
of finding a particular wisp of hay in the stable, the hay trampled under
foot by livestock. Which wisp of hay do you want, which wisp of hay do
you recognize-indiscernable, undistinguishable-and what are you
doing looking for a wisp of hay in this heap? Nonetheless my hope centers
on this wisp of hay; yes, in no matter what chaos of the present, a fluctua-
tion, tomorrow, has just conceived a child who reportedly changes the
world. Other fluctuations fade away, remaining mere wisps of hay. I know
no other face of hope than the wisp of hay that shines alone in the indif-
ference, in the incongruity, the banality, the disorder of the stable.
Newton's hope shone like an apple in the middle of a collective orchard of
apple trees; a single apple has just captured a ray of light, and shines with
hope: it has understood the world. My hope lies in the unexpected-what
can I expect from the dreary execution of laws? My hope is as rare as the
single wisp of hay, my hope is that wisp both rare and common, so satur-
ated with rarity that it becomes banal and numerous, crammed with infor-
mation. My hope is the idea of genius that shines, lost in the hay. My hope
does not follow the straight road, the monotonous and dreary methodol-
ogy from which novelty has fled; my hope invents the cut-off trail, broken,
chosen at random from the wasp, the bee, the fly. For thirty-plus years I
have watched the flight of flies, wasps and bees, against the teacher's
orders; forty years of laziness in which I watch the flight of hope. I do not
fear the chaotic and Brownian leap of the wasp. The master of the dis-
course on method would have feared it. I can't find the wisp of hay; I can't
foresee the wasp's flight; I can't understand the dust that dances in the ray
of sunlight. But I know that if I can find (or one day, foresee)-fabulous
fortune finally won in roulette, major stroke of genius, luminous burst of
intuition-what a hope, no-my only expectation. What expectation do we
have, if not this circumstance? It can only be thought of in and by a
concealed knowledge, somewhat dark, unobtrusive, a bit muddled and
chaotic, black and white, in the exquisite proximity of sleep-r in the
exquisite, inchoate, and happy proximity of awakening. Why work at it?
Hope shines, for those half-closed eyes, attentive and lazy, in the half-light
of dawn and of evening, in the dance of dust in the sun's rays close to the
horizon, in the zigzag flight of the wasp, in the disordered myriads of hay,
l'espoir luit comme un brin de paille duns l'ktable, que crains-tu de la gu@e ivre de
son vol fou, va, le soleil toujours poudroie d quelque trou, que ne t'endormais-tu le
coude sur la table?
24 Michel Serres

We do not remain immersed in background noise-hope shines to

save us from it. From sleep to waking, from noise to rhythm and signal,
and from the unconscious to the conscious, the sounding taken by Verlaine
goes deeper than the deepest strata of language; it goes all the way to the
cry of the newborn baby-deeper, to the wave, to the clamor, to the dust-
haze.
The exit from the well, the emergence of sound over n ~ i s ethe, sowing
of the quasi-measured over the multiple, of redundance over chaos. The
woman's steps resonate, the hours chime, rhythm, first, comes-a gentle
rocking, crooning. The child, who does not yet speak, is coddled. We leave
behind the childhood of noise, of sleep, of water from the well. The water
represents disorder, as it is said that the spirit of God hovered over the
waters, as it is said that Aphrodite emerged from the waters, as one sub-
scribes to the rite of baptism so soul and body are saved from the waters,
as it is said that Moses was saved from the waters.
Rhythm appears against background noise, the vague rhythm of rock-
ing and crooning and coddling. Remember that coddling (dorloter) means
to curl one's hair (dorelot, old French = a large curl of hair), to rhythmically
run one's fingers through a curl of hair, impelled by repetition. Redundant
coddling. The curl of time.
Noon chimes, time arrives. Millions of wisps of hay emerge, the zigzag
flight of wasps, myriads of dust particles in the sunlight. This is the begin-
ning of time. Noon is both the middle and the beginning.
First: noon chimes the exact hour of alexandrine verse. The alexan-
drine chimes justly not only in the language of France, but it also counts
exactly on the circumference of time, on the wheel of the clock, as the best
means of counting time. Time is rhythm, and rhythm makes a circle. The
circle can only be divided into twelve, handily: into two and into three,
which is to say into six; into three, into four, and into six, which is to say
into twelve. The metric system, useful enough for measuring straight lines,
is useless for circles. And since technology most often works in circles, the
metric system is useless-it would be better to agree to a basis of duo-
decimals. A circle is a dozen, quite simply. The alexandrine thus chimes the
exact hour, the right division of time, including the caesura; circular, it
keeps time as accurately as a good wristwatch. Wheel of duration, the
unity of time.
Time, like Aphrodite, emerges from chaos; noon chimes on the clock of
the alexandrine. So music emerges from the wisp of hay, so rhythm is born
in the flight of the wasp-noon chimes again and always. Poetry rises from
background noise.
Literature and the Exact Sciences 25

Music is not simply rhythm. Rhythm repeats stupidly, stubbornly,

ineptly. It rolls, eternally returning, redundant. Music glides and disrupts
time. Seven hours, nine hours, eleven hours. Le pair is redundant; l'impair
tends toward music.
The bad writer has an ear for the pair; the good has it for the impair.
The former has only rhythm, the latter writes in music-that's the lesson of
Verlaine. L'impair teaches the ear, or the beating heart, or the multiple,
arhythmical coenesthesia-the counterbeat. When you are on the border-
line of sleep, listen for the flight of the wasp, and you will retrace the path
of the background noise behind the music. What comes first, after the
noise, via the rhythm and its repetitions, is the symmetry of the pair, is the
alexandrine-noon chimes. Later it requires work, perseverance, and cour-
age to arrive at the impair-musical, gliding. It requires more than hope; it
requires expectation.
Once the impair is found, something else happens. Twelve is not our
true unity of time; twelve is divisible, as I said, by two, by three, by
four-spondees, trochees, dactyls, anapests. The old Latin components that
secretly make up our young language return, dividing up the hour of
noon. Midi sonne forms an anapest, pair and impair, as you you wish; in the
sonnet it gives an alexandrine that is impair. Anapest, as we know, means
accented or stressed backwards. Midi sonne-noon chimes-the return of
the rhythm towards the left or towards the right; it is not said in which
direction the woman directs her steps. Twelve is broken down into ele-
ments of prosody; the ear, the heart, the coenesthesia emerge from the
background noise to constitute these bits of music, these fragments of
rhythm, little dwarfs, djinns, which together chime the hour, pair or im-
pair-it matters not-eleven o'clock or twelve. Writing is never anything
but constructing a puzzle from these molecules, true unities at the artisan's
disposal since Greek and Latin antiquity. There, the coenesthetic sleep
listening for noise plunges towards the depths of time, toward the tradi-
tional formation of language.
Our language's components are the divisors of twelve. These dwarves
cannot be broken down. No one has ever written-if he has the concern or
the hope of writing-except by means of these djinns emerging from the
sea on one foot, these dwarves clamoring from the background noise. Two
or three, which is to say six; three or four, which is to say twelve-spon-
dees, dactyls, trochees, anapests-but the Greek and Latin languages knew
nothing of the silent "e." Thus the feminine rhyme produces everywhere
its absence or its supplement; it produces here and there the impair,
music-it's amazing how the woman's steps resonate, resonate when midi
26 Michel Serres

sonne, when noon chimes twice. The feminine foot adds and subtracts, it
produces the major from the minor charm. I am talking here about writing
in general, prose and poetry-pair and impair don't matter-the important
thing is the unity of the piece, its form and disposition, its femininity-I
mean its virtual, eventual femininity. The bad writer has an ear for the pair,
the mediocre has an ear for the impair; he who begins to write about
writing has an ear both Latin and feminine.

The chaos of dust particles dancing in a ray of sunlight, the hum of

wasps flying in zigzag motion, the multiplicity of wisps of hay, exact
images of coenesthesia's sound of falling water, perceived at the moment
of falling asleep--these form the background, the multiple and stochastic
background upon which an order appears-a rhythm, a measuredness, a
beat, a form (a beautiful form), a language better than language: prosody,
music, the musical theory of our language. From the hollow, from the
chaotic crucible comes a form, strong, complete, crystallized, ordered-a
pebble.
An ordered crystal is born in the chaos of the wisps of hay. Dazzling
intuition, exact construction.

Midi sonne-noon chimes-in an even-numbered rhythm or an odd-

numbered one, but, by its final foot, feminine. It counts four, and the rest of
the alexandrine is octosyllabic, marking off the eight remaining stresses. It
also forms an anapest: two short, one long. Pair, impair, and Latin fragment.
This meeting is made possible only by the feminine step or foot. De @ce,
doignez-vous, madame, so that I may hear the resonance of your steps. The
woman's footstep runs the risk of being odd-numbered, impair, its mute-
ness creates a distance, it counts and chimes, it doesn't count and it reson-
ates; it chimes, it doesn't chime in the ears, it resonates in the brain, which
counts. The woman's steps are audible, unheard and secret, weightless,
unhesitating; noon chimes four, noon chimes three, one hears the step, one
doesn't hear the step, the mute vowel prolongs the sound, which resonates.
The masculine foot chimes, the feminine foot resonates. The mute feminine
prolongs, underscores or subtracts by its absence, runs the risk of the
impair, infuses the rhythm with music.
Literature and the Exact Sciences 27

Midi sonne is repeated two times, at the beginning of the two tercets;
the hour always chimes twice. Noon chimes four, noon chimes three, noon
chimes two. He sleeps. Va, dors-go, sleep. Two. Two similar new begin-
nings that chime two. The first tercet gives the secret of the count, the
second prepares one to listen for the woman's footsteps. The second tercet
continues to count, it counts truly. Midi sonne, four or three; Va, dors, two;
Ah, one. A wedge inserts itself in the beginnings of these lines, dividing
them first in an even-numbered way, (in fact, the first two are divided into
four-eight and two-ten), but the last one counts truly: one-eleven-it
counts impair; music is infused into the rhythm.
The pair makes the rhythm, the impair makes the music, for it prefers
the feminine. Amazing footstep of the woman.
As is required of a sonnet, the last verse tells all and adds to it; it
understands and transcends, chimes and resonates. It counts twelve, it
counts one, it counts eleven, noon chimes noon, an alexandrine pair, noon
chimes twice impair, one and eleven. Pedestrian rhythm, musical flight,
foot poised in midair.
The sense lurks on the outskirts of the sound, borders on the rhythm,
is intertwined with the music, is carried by it. Twelve counts the hours-
noon-and counts the months also; the year, the day are alexandrines. The
pause that for the former took place at noon, for the latter took place in
September. Hope shines to see the roses of September bloom again.
September is the first of the counted months, or, in the year, the first
number. The year has a kind of law: the first months are named for ancient
rites: February comes from the Lupercalia, from the leather lashes with
which the men, naked in the street, whipped the women; next come the
gods, Mars and Juno, or the beginning of Aphrodite; then follow the kings,
the emperors, Julius, Augustus; the series ends by the numbers. As though
history were born, came from the origins of time, dark, incomprehensible,
from myth and rite; as though it were somewhat enlightened by the gods,
as though it finally descended to the level of history, but royal history, in
the hands or in the names of the powerful, and as though it ended in
numbers, science, in the simple objectivity of counting. September is the
first of the counted months.
Now, it counts seven, although it is the ninth.
The last verse chimes noon, twelve. It chimes eleven, nine, seven. I
strip some leaves from this September rose. Twelve-eleven-nine-seven.
Midi sonne, four, midi sonne, three, ah, one-the breaking up of the pair into
its possible impairs. De la musique avant toute chose, pour cela pr@re l'impair.
28 Michel Serres

Time begins, the tenses of the verbs are mixed; midi sonne-noon
chimes, in the gently rocking rhythm of the pair, in the quasi-rhythmic
dorlotemenf, before the rustling dispersal of sleep, in the wisps of hay in the
stable, beneath the crazy flight of the wasp, among the dancing dust par-
ticles in the ray of sunlight. Noise, rhythm, time. Now music comes, the
crooning, in the quasi-rhythmic impair. The rhythm, pair, returns, ritornel-
lo, cradle; the music rises u p and flies, impair. Sometimes the feminine foot
gives, mutely, a distance from the pair. Pour cela, pr&re Septembre. Septem-
ber is the first of the counted months, it chimes the impair twice-nine and
seven; it is the first month with a feminine ending-all the previous ones
are masculine.
The rhythm, the music carry the meaning.
Does the sonnet end with an agreement with the seventh or the ninth?
It starts with noise, continues with time, continues with rhythm, pro-
duces music, and discovers meaning.

Not all roses bloom again in September. The rhythm, the music carry
the meaning, they bring September, they bring the roses. Rosaceous plants
have five sepals, five groups of petals. September chimes nine and seven,
and the roses chime five. Clocks are alexandrines, roses are not. Clocks are
cruciferous, even-numbered, divided in two and in two times two: clocks,
pair; roses, impair. The roses are not the roses des vents, the marked points of
the face of a compass, cruciferous, pair; the roses of September are pen-
tagonal like rose windows. The roses complete the impair.
The last line is impair, divided into one and eleven. September counts
nine and seven. The rose counts five.
Noon chimes, twelve times. Noon chimes three times.
This is how the pair transforms itself into the impair.

The pair is transformed into the impair in the rhythm of the line that
intertwines with the emergence of the meaning. The rhythm comes from
noise, the gentle rocking comes from the hay and the wasp and the par-
ticles of dust in the sunlight; the music, the crooning that arises from the
rhythm and the gentle rocking produces the meaning. September is essen-
tial and the rose is essential by their numbers; the numbers themselves call
forth the words.
Literature and the Exact Sciences 29

Midi sonne. The alexandrine clock, the dozen, marks off its uneven
numbers. Eleven for the rhythm. Nine and seven and five for the meaning
that emerges. Noon chimes three for the rhythm. Ah! one. The even-num-
bered rhythm and the odd-numbered music have just created meaning: the
roses of September.
I divide the clock in two and in two times two; I call it cruciferous-it
shows the cross. Its quadrants are cut into threes. Three: Midi sonne. Two: I1
dort. Two, three, four, six, twelve: the clock is truly alexandrine, by a subtle
mixture of pair and impair, where the pair dominates. That's the rhythm,
that's time.
The rose is divided into five, sepals and petals, pentamerous. Three:
Midi sonne. Two: Va, dors. Two and three, five, subtle mixture of the impair
and the pair, where the impair dominates. The rose is somewhat decimal.
Here are the clock and the rose-window, together; two forms, cruci-
ferous and roseate, rose and cross. The secret of this veiled sonnet that we
are trying to draw out, could it be the rosae crucis (cross of roses)? Sprays of
September roses on the cruciferous clock.
Here are two dials and two wheels, the wristwatch and the flower; two
irreducible spatial inscriptions of rhythm, two liaisons of the pair and the
impair, the first secret of music. Here are two dials and two wheels, clock
and rose-window, two divisions of rays, two radiating arrangements, suns.
The chaos, hubbub or background noise dances like dust particles in
the sunlight, unformed disorder of the sleeping body where the soul
swims, pale and white. An order forms itself by the rhythm and the music,
the meaning comes like the sun. Divided in twelve or ordered in five, the
alexandrine wheel or decimal, clock or rose-window, radiates-it shines.

Form comes from formlessness; meaning springs from the hubbub.

What can be said about meaning? Noise is rarely probable. Chaos is prob-
ably like the dust haze, or like the wisps of hay in the stable, and meaning
is as rare as a rose-window. Meaning is rarity itself. So rare that it contains
something of a miracle, of hope.
What is meaning? The rays in which the dust particles dance organize
themselves, the wisps of hay cross each other, they arrange themselves
around the center of the dial; they divide it into five, the symmetry of the
rose, or into six or twelve, the hours and months of time. What is the
meaning that emerges? It is the angle of the ray, the direction the wisp of
hay takes, the direction in which the wasp flies, towards which the dust
30 Michel Serres

particles dance; the direction is the meaning (Je sens est le sens). The direc-
tion of the light or of the wind on the clock or on the compass dial (rose des
vents), the direction taken by the magnetic needle.
Meaning is that rare direction in the tangle of directions towards
which the wasp flies and never flies, towards which the dust particles fly
and never fly; it is the pointing ray, the index, or the resting place of the
wisp of hay.

I would like to be able to sketch the wisps of hay on the floor of the
stable, their scattered heap. I see it. Among these wisps, short straws and
long ones jumbled together in confusion, pell-mell, this one rests this way,
another forms with it a St. Andrew's cross, another forms with them a
triangle, a fourth crosses the triangle, another is parallel to the first, yet
another takes off at a right angle from this schema. Many build on this
right angle, like a network seemingly made up of strata, folds, fabric, holes,
and geometric shapes. Each wisp of hay has a direction in space, not only
on the flat surface, but in volume-each one forms an angle. None appears
to be magnetically drawn in the same direction. Thus myriads of wisps of
hay indicate myriads of directions (meanings) (sens).
I would like to be able to sketch the zigzag flight of the crazy wasp, its
confused trail. I see it. The fragmented short or long flights follow one
another without order as to direction-headlong, distancing. The wasp
flies towards the credenza, turns towards the wall, descends at length
towards the table, appears obliged to rest in a hidden cranny, suddenly
crosses the room, approaches the ceiling. Its flight makes little zones, as
though it were spinning a cocoon; it traces long bars; each fragment has its
direction in space, not only in one dimension, but in the entire volume;
each one forms an angle. None appears to be magnetically drawn in the
same direction. Thus myriads of fragments of flight indicate myriads of
directions (meanings) (sens).
The stable resembles an abandoned compass factory where all the
magnetic needles were dumped. The wasp's flight plan is to follow the
course of each one. The particles of dust in the ray of sunlight follow all the
courses at once.
Suppose a hollow, a kind of hole, that is the bottom, a sort of well.
Suppose a pebble, a mass, a volume, still fairly featureless. Suppose this
pebble in that hollow. It came here, it was drawn by this well, directed
towards this attractor, in its direction.
Literature and the Exact Sciences 31

I want the hollow to be formless, the mass to be rough, even crude, not
worn. Any pebble in any hole-both scalene. IVs a particle of noise, with
crazy edges, unique and multiple like wisps of hay or dust in the sunlight.
Whoever falls asleep plunges into the particle, fluctuating, before the mur-
muring ocean.
Waking gives form to the formless, gives meaning to the untamed
intoxication. It is as though the mass were defining its own borders, as
though the pebble, the rock were revealing the order in its size, as though
crude matter were revealing the mark of the chisel. A pebble like so many
others, in an ordinary hollow, becomes a rose and a clock, a clock in its
setting, a rose-window in the cathedral. Shaped, organized, perfect, over-
flowing a thousandfold with meaning, with intention, with symbols, with
science.
He who sleeps and he who is awake descend into the depths of the
well, into the deep and dark hollow where the pebble lies in the lapping of
the water, and ascend from the formless mass towards the chiselled stone,
towards the clock, meaning and form, organization of space, sense of time.
Sun, rays, and wheel.
The noise is the background, the pebbly depth-granular, sandy,
quasi-liquid, fluctuating-that underlies information; the shape is rare, like
language. Language: the rose; noise: the pebble, the water with which one
sprinkles the floor of the room.
Sprinkles, so that roses come, from noise to meaning.

Sun, Another Epistemology

The sun is no longer the lord of knowledge and its ultimate end or its
first beginning, as well as its totality; it becomes here a little, bright cone
with dust particles coming through a crack in the dark box of the stable. It
falls by chance on a wisp of hay. The sun does not inundate the volume, the
place; it does not occupy the space, it doesn't take up all the room. A god
under whose reign there will never be anything new, the sun reduces itself
to a single ray, entering, by chance, through a hole. One ray among myr-
iads, a coincidence, a wisp of hay found there. Beneath the solitary and
all-encompassing sun, the unity of knowledge shines. The light extin-
guishes the innumerable multiplicity of the different stars. Knowledge, in
32 Michel Serres

the light of day, has lost time. Since the East, nothing new. Nothing new
since dawn, since that light has been shining, since the Age of Enlighten-
ment. Since the Greek Sun, since the one God, since Science. Since Plato,
since the wisdom of Solomon, since Louis XIV and the Aufkliirung.
This is the age of glimmers. Knowledge enlightens; that which glim-
mers is only a hope. Trembling. Fragile. Slight. Unstable. Circumstantial.
Flying. Numerous. Nonsensical. Intoxicated. Fragmented. Vague in its
goal. Cluttered. The ray of sunlight is saturated with dust. King Sun sees
his laurels turn to dust. He barely sheds light on the wisp of hay, he flickers
beneath the number of dust particles. This is the age of flashes, of local
occulations, the age of fireflies; the ray of sunlight seems to fall on the wisp
of hay in the same way that the roulette wheel stops-one knows not
why-on a certain number. This is the age of scintillation.
No, it's not the night, contrasting stupidly with the day, but the day
itself, the day, moreover, chiming noon. At noon, the sun, in power at the
height of its reign, rules from the apex of the day-a summer day, since the
room is sprinkled with water. If the sun ever holds the volume of the earth
without a shadow, it's on a summer noonday, that moment that has no
share of the night. Night always accompanies day somewhat, in the long or
short shadow-tails attached to things, except at noon. This is the age of
lights; this is, moreover, the season and the hour of light. Bright and
distinct knowledge, exalted as royalty, triumphs. It's the Age of Science,
the hour of science, its season, in majesty.
In this new noonday, the sun, knowledge, is only able to filter through
a crack; a pale being falls asleep as though night were falling. The being is
not inundated with light; rather, it loses consciousness and slowly des-
cends into the babbling that precedes language; the sun scintillates like a
star. The age and the hour of the dust haze, the age and hour of scintilla-
tion.
The age and hour of enlightenment brings with it clear and distinct
knowledge, scientific unity, the triumph of reason. The age and the hour of
scintillation brings with it tentative knowledge, given over to large num-
bers and to circumstances, to distributions, interceptions, to large popula-
tions, the random choice of a wisp of rare information by means of the
angle of the sun; the theory of knowledge gives its kingdom in exchange
for expectations.

I1 y a du nouveau sous le rayon de soleil.

Midi sonne. Le temps commence.
L'6tre laisse une chance a u temps.
Literature and the Exact Sciences 33

There is something new under the sun.

Noon chimes. Time begins.
The being gives time a chance.

We have abandoned the platonist god, the Age of Enlightenment, the

triumph of science. Where are we headed? Perhaps we finally know that
we are following the wasp.
The epistemology of enlightenment, of clear knowledge, presupposes
the sun as its source, harks back to its greatness, power, and victory-a sort
of male myth. Shade is added to emphasize its beauty, plus the division
with night, in order to relegate shadows there. Noontide without shadows
marks total knowledge, the spirit of absolutism, as one speaks of royal
absolutism. The nychthemeral cycle is a great opportunity for those di-
visions of error and truth, of science and dreams, of obscurantism and
progress.
A new epistemology emerges in which the sun, aging male, flam-
boyant and superb, becomes modest. The multiple returns beneath the ray
of the single, the man falls asleep while hearing the footsteps of the wom-
an; knowledge gives way to expectation, light gives way to that which
gleams.
Never have triumphant religions, glorified politics or science at its
apogee tolerated images so discreetly.
What are all these triumphs to me if I have no hope?

Thus is the hard sun transformed into gentle scintillation by the music
of Verlaine's poem.

Threat of Death, Chance of Life

Our literature is becoming dead letters, enbalmed and henceforth il-

legible in so-called "scholarly" editions, surrounded by a spiked belt of
criticism, inaccessible, made repugnant by teaching. I will never again read
those things for which school gave me a disgust. On the other hand, in the
future no one will ever write or speak, as even now no one ever publishes,
without the control of numbers, of algorithms.
34 Michel Serres

Though our literature appears reduced to some trash diffused by the

media, I think that it will not die-rather, that we even will achieve our
greatest vitality under the conditions of inventing, quickly, the Third Cur-
riculum. I mean well-rounded thought, that of both our hands and both
our hemispheres. That is the role model, necessary yet lacking. Ecumen-
icism is impossible as long as as it is in the interests of the clerics to remain
separate. However, we can no longer leave algorithmic ratiocination and
literary rehashings completely segregated, without mortal danger. We
must imagine a way in which to teach, with the same gesture, both the
poem and the theorem, without wronging either and with mutual enrich-
ment: experimentation and experience, the new world of scientists and the
storytelling of time immemorial, the immortal world of scientific laws and
the new age of the arts. Those taught the third approach to knowledge,
born from this mixed school, will have chucked the death wish that makes
us cut ourselves off, that puts our world in danger.

Translated by Roxanne Lapidus

NOTES

1. k systPme de kibniz et ses modkles mathkmtiques. Paris: P.U.F. Second Edition,

647-712. L,e pamdigme pascalien.
2. L,e Parasite, ed. Grasset, 1980.
3. Jouvences sur lules Verne. Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1974.
4. Feux et signaux de brumes. Ed. Grasset, 1975.