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Sent: 11 May 2006 23:41
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Subject: [CTHEORY] 1000 Days of Theory: Revisiting The Natural Contract
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CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 29, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
1000 Days 039 11/05/2006 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
_____________________________________________________________________
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1000 DAYS OF THEORY
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_____________________________________________________________________
Revisiting The Natural Contract
======================================
~Michel Serres~
translation by Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon
"A satellite for speed, an atomic bomb for energy, the Internet
for space, and nuclear waste for time...these are four examples
of world-objects."
-- Michel Serres
A leading French philosopher (and mathematician) of the humanities in the
age of posthuman culture, Michel Serres' writings represent the creative
edge of a form of thought which in its intensity and planetary
dimensionality sums us the crises and paradoxes of 21st century life.
Renowned for his philosophical excursions concerning thermodynamics,
complexity and chaos theory in science, technology and practice, Serres has
literally written the history of the "world-object" in books including
_Hermes_, _Genesis_, _The Troubador of Knowledge_, _The Parasite_,
_Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time_, and _The Natural Contract_.
_CTheory_ is pleased to publish a translation of a paper presented by
Michel Serres to the Institute of the Humanities at Simon Fraser University
(Canada) on May 4, 2006. "Revisiting The Natural Contract" focuses on
Serres'
famous 1990 publication, _The Natural Contract_.
-- Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Editors
Ecology
=======
This word appeared in the French language for the first time around 1874,
following the German usage proposed by Haeckel in 1866; however it seems
that the American philosopher Thoreau, had already invented the word in
1852. Since then ecology has acquired two meanings:
1. It refers to a scientific discipline, dedicated to the study of
more or less numerous sets of living beings interacting with
their environment. The discipline of ecology started with a
comprehensive study of the Mont Ventoux, in France, and about
the same time with the development of limnology or the science
of lakes, with studies in the vicinity of Madison, Wisconsin. In
studying the interlinked totality of living beings and inert
objects, ecology relies on the combination of both traditional
and recent disciplines, mathematics (differential equations),
thermodynamics, biochemistry etc.
2. Ecology also refers to the controversial ideological and
political doctrine varying from author to author or group to
group that aims at the protection of the environment through
diverse means.
History and Philosophy of Law
-----------------------------
Published in 1990, and written in the previous decade, _The Natural
Contract_ does not use the term ecology once. Why not? because it deals
with the philosophy and the history of Law, and in particular with the
question of who has the right to become a legal subject. For centuries,
only adult males who belonged to an upper social class could introduce and
defend a legal action: Greek and Roman citizens, nobles, bourgeois. ...
excluding slaves, foreigners, women and children, the poor and destitute..
Little by little, some form of emancipation enabled the latter to become
legal subjects, that is "of age" in the eyes of the law and other public
institutions. I am ashamed to say that I was taught in my youth about the
establishment of universal suffrage while women only got the right to vote
in my country in 1944; they even needed their husband's signed permission
to open a bank account.
This entire history ends at least theoretically, with the famous
_Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen_, decreed during the
French Revolution, and at the end of the last war, with a similar but
universal Declaration published by UNESCO. Thus, everyone is a legal
subject today.
My book argues that this Declaration is not yet universal as long as it
does not determine that all living beings and all inert objects, in short,
all of Nature have in turn become legal subjects.
Who signs the contract?
-----------------------
The main objection to my book consists in asking the author: who will sign
the Contract since Nature does not have a hand with which to write nor an
understanding capable of any such intention.
I am neither so dumb nor so animistic to think that Nature is a person. I
could also answer that the same objection was leveled at Rousseau's social
contract; no one has ever signed this contract in a ceremony the date and
circumstances of which could be documented. The General Will has as few
hands as nature.
Therefore these Contracts must be conceived as preconditions. If we live
together in such and such a way, everything occurs as if we had signed the
Social Contract. If today we protect certain endangered species, it is
because we acknowledge their right to exist, at least virtually. During the
British colonial period, the hunters in Bengal did not recognize the rights
of tigers, even to the point of extinction. We are beginning to conceive
the possibility of lawsuits that, for example, oppose polluters and this
park or forest or that mangrove swamp. Such lawsuits are only possible
because of the tacit acceptance that these "things" are legal subjects.
Our present behaviors, even our sensibility now take into consideration
the fragility of things, and so presuppose that Nature is slowly becoming a
legal subject.
Despite differences between epochs, traditional Western philosophy
attempts to discover a place from which one can simultaneously observe
scientific reason and legal reason, the laws of the physical world and the
political laws of human collectivities, the rules of Nature and the rules
of Contracts. This is why the terms that designate those principles are the
same in the major languages.
This is true of Plato and Aristotle, Lucretius and the Stoics; it applies
to Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Middle Ages, Spinoza and Hobbes, to the
classical age, and closer to us, Kant and Hegel. In search of such a place,
_The Natural Contract_ deals with the philosophy of knowledge and action in
relation to problems posed by contemporary science and technology.
The New World-Object
====================
Heat and the world-objects
--------------------------
As soon as human technology started using heat, vaporous mixtures expanded
everywhere in all directions and at random; recent core sampling of glacial
inlandsis have been able to date the beginning of the bronze age almost to
the year, thanks to traces of the first effluents emitted by archaic ovens
in the Middle East which were dispersed everywhere and carried by snowfall
to those high latitudes.
Who would have thought that globalization started as early as our
prehistory?
The industrial revolution generalized and propagated thermal techniques
which accelerated the rise of the local towards the global, the causes or
consequences of which philosophy has not yet studied. Since I frequently
described this rise in previous books, _The Natural Contract_ begins by
simply mentioning it. Our know-how has been dedicated in recent times to
the production of world-objects, a concept that I defined twenty-five years
ago in _Thanatocracy_ (Hermes III, p. 101), taking as examples ballistic
missiles, fixed satellites and nuclear waste. By world-objects I mean tools
with a dimension that is commensurable with one of the dimensions of the
world. A satellite for speed, an atomic bomb for energy, the Internet for
space, and nuclear waste for time...these are four examples of
world-objects.
What is an object?
------------------
What then is an object? In the literal sense it is: "that which has been
thrown or which one throws in front." Are world-objects lying in front of
us? The global dimension that characterizes them eliminates the distance
between us and them which in the past defined objects.
We now live in those world-objects as we live in the world.
Traditional technologies, tools and machines form units with a local range
of action in space and time: the sledgehammer drives in the stake, the plow
cuts the furrow, in sum, they define an environment where few humans
worked, for example a family living on a farm. Such a division of the world
into localities allows for a philosophy of mastery and possession, because
we can define what we dominate, how we dominate it and who is meant by this
we. As the range of action of the objects increased, so did the number of
humans that produced or used them; but also vice-versa in a kind of
feedback. Smelting furnaces and airline companies do not mobilize the same
groups; the concentration and size of subjects condition those of objects.
However, the reverse also takes place.
Little by little globalization forms a new universe based on thermal
techniques and developed further by the quantitative increase of
world-objects. We see these now as technical, physical, and we will soon
see them as human and legal as well. Can we still call these things
objects, and the people who use them subjects? Are our communication
networks objects?
Dependency and possession
-------------------------
It is perfectly possible to master a given place in a short period of time
and to become its possessor; in the final analysis property is the
occupation of a niche and thus the demarcation of a place. But we do not
know the ins and outs of global mastery of the universe.
Because our philosophies are dedicated to difference and distinction, they
can only achieve accurate definitions at the local level. As a result they
handle categories of totality with difficulty. The Cartesian adage
concerning the possession of nature does not define the conditions of
mastery over such a vast "object."
On the other hand, that same recommendation of mastery is inscribed in the
slow historical displacement of the old stoic division between things that
depend on us and things that do not. Again, what "things"? In a second
Cartesian act, those "things" that at first did not depend on us suddenly
do now, and increasingly so; but, in the third act, we ourselves suddenly
depend, and increasingly so, on things that depend on actions that we
undertake. Our survival depends on a world that we create with technologies
whose elements depend on our decisions.
To the Stoic division, and the Cartesian mastery now succeeds a spiral
where mastery and dependency interact and retroact and where obsolete,
solitary subjects, are mingled with outdated objects.
Thirty years ago already, I wrote that today mastery of the world must be
replaced by the mastery of mastery.
The world or nature: ~homo sive natura~
---------------------------------------
We do not know what the world is like today; we are only beginning to know
it and this knowledge differs from our knowledge of a circumscribed object.
We are just beginning to act on the world and this practice differs from
our action on circumscribed objects.
Therefore philosophy's task is to re-examine ancient concepts such as the
subject, whether individual or collective, the object, knowledge and
action. Those concepts developed over millennia, at least in the West,
under the prior condition of local divisions which defined a gap between
subject and object in which action and knowledge operated. The measure of
that gap conditioned them. Local division, distance, measure... this whole
production of theories and practices is falling apart today as we enter a
broader scene. Older categories of totality such as being-in-the-world
become concerns of objective knowledge, relevant to the problem of politics
and technical action.
Thus they go from metaphysics to physics, from speculation to action, from
ontology to responsibility, from ethics to politics.
A certain nature, not in the common meaning of the term, but in its purely
etymological sense, is being born which is new for our globalized knowledge
and acts.
This nature returns as a condition of knowledge, action and even survival,
now that the new subjects are encompassed by it as soon as they act upon
it.
~Homo sive natura~.
Objectivity: The Whole Earth
----------------------------
1. Perception: thanks to photographs taken by the astronauts, we
see the whole Earth. This view is different from ancient visual
perceptions that presupposed the Earth as an unseen background.
Being-in-the-world never saw the world before.
2. Transmissions, information and knowledge: through the Web and
e-mail we communicate with the entire Earth. The consequences
for knowledge and the human community today transform our living
conditions. Being-in-the-world never before heard the world.
3. Practices: through our techniques and their effluents, we act on
the entire Earth, the climate and global warming. As soon as we
act on it, it changes and we change and we no longer live in the
same way. All we can do is bet on the consequences of those
actions for our survival. Being-in-the-world never acted on the
world before.
Subjectivity: Humanity
----------------------
1. For better and for worse, information and communication, with
their intermediaries and powers, traverse the entire Earth and
its inhabitants, defining new communities, a global "we."
2. Today communities of audiences, spectators and contributors
emerge, creating a global public opinion, which at first is
scientific and technological, and no doubt eventually political
and moral.
3. To the whole Earth there corresponds humanity, no longer
abstract, sentimental and potential, as in the past and until
fairly recently, but present and soon to be fully realized. A
certain humanism is reborn, resting on the new Grand Narrative
of our paleo-anthropological origins.
Collectivity: New Object-Subject Distribution
=============================================
The subject becomes object: we become the victims of our victories, the
passivity of our activities. The global object becomes subject because it
reacts to our actions like a partner.
The earlier Rio and the more recent Kyoto meetings on global warming show
the progressive formation of that new collective global subject which is
situated facing or inside the new natural global object.
The cost of knowledge and action
--------------------------------
Classical Western philosophy never calculated the cost of knowledge or
action but considered them to be free of charge. However, as soon as work
appears, everything is subject to the martial law of price.
The yield of work is never one on one; there are always residues and
garbage. As long as work remains cold and local, price is calculated in
terms of profit and loss. As soon as heat enters work, the productivity of
the thermic machine is calculated. When world-objects are in operation, the
cost becomes commensurable with a world dimension. Local, negligible waste
is succeeded by global pollution of the world.
Legal Conditions of Knowledge and Action
========================================
Things and causes: the archaic and the new Contract
----------------------------------------------------
Let us return to things themselves: for the Western linguist and
historian, causes or cases precede things and the first known subject is
the legal subject. The contract precedes knowledge and action.
The French word "cause" designates an objectivity; it is indeed derived
from the Latin ~causa~, a legal term used to designate what is at stake in
a lawsuit, or the lawsuit itself. The thing originally then appears as
something about which there is a debate, a suit, the decision of a court,
something about which there will be a contract.
Knowledge of the thing flows from the establishment of a legal authority
that names both the agreement and its object. Similarly, the English thing
is derived from a term of Germanic law. In our European languages then, the
emergence of a thing is always accompanied by a social contract: does it
constitute the group or does the group constitute it? We will probably
never know which preceded the other. In any case, objectivity appears at
the same time as a collective and this appearance takes place under legal
conditions.
Subjects, objects, knowledge
----------------------------
Similarly, the first known subject is a legal subject. For that reason,
_The Natural Contract_ deals almost exclusively with the
question: who has the right to become a legal subject? Western history
shows the progressive increase in legal subjects: slaves at first, then
children and women, the recent date of whose inclusion shames the West.
The whole question concerns first and foremost the status of subjects, and
then that of objects. Some thought it was crazy to propose a contract that
would commit us to an object and through which it would be committed. The
same objections were leveled at Rousseau; the _Social Contract_ was never
signed in known or knowable history by any human or collectivity because in
his work it designates the ~sine qua non~ or transcendental condition for
the formation of societies. Bacon could have been criticized in the same
way: whom does one command, whom does one obey, in his famous adage
according to which one can only command Nature by obeying it?
And yet, as with any change in scale, globalization progressively and
profoundly transforms the respective status of objects and subject, as
action and knowledge strive towards the universal: the objective status of
the collective subject changes because from formerly active, it becomes the
passive, global object of forces and constraints that result from its own
actions; the status of the world-object also changes as, from formerly
passive, it becomes active, from formerly a given, it becomes our ~de
facto~ partner.
Thus we can no longer describe the scene of knowledge and action with the
medieval couple of subject-object; the terms are changing as well as their
relation.
Concerning this relation, I know of no knowledge that does not start out
from legal conditions whose impact in the history of science increases at
least as fast as the conditions of globalization. Every body of knowledge
requires an agreement or a consensus that must be established by an
authority in fact or by right. In education we must present ourselves to
examiners for graduation, competitions or publications. Before saying
anything, whether it be true, false or probable, even before saying that
this or that is or is not an object of science, such and such authority
deliberates and decides in an adversarial process.
Legal subjects proclaim the rights of objects.
Case History
------------
Those legal conditions have not always prevented fatal outcomes.
Everyone cites Galileo's trial as the exceptional action that founded
modern science in the West. Not so! I do not know of any Greek scholar
concerned with objective science, astronomy, physics or medicine, who was
not on some occasion called before the court on the charge of neglecting
the political affairs of his country. They all risked or lost their life
for having interrogated the stars or the plants. The Greek history of
important trials testifies abundantly to the fact that the thing emerges
with the case. Fairly rare in the Christian area and era, a trial like
Galileo's seems rather a remnant of that distant history.
As I noted at the beginning, the fact that the great western philosophies
(from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel) attempt to discover a common place from
which to think both science and law at the same time, seems to me a
significant trace of that origin. Why do we designate both types of law
with the same term, why do we say or not say nature for the world and for
humans?
Today we must conceive a new object that goes far beyond the status of
local objects, because if we treat the world as an object we are condemned
in turn to become the objects of that object. To think this new situation,
we need to return to the original legal gesture. This newly emerging object
enters thought with a new Contract that simultaneously establishes the new
global object and the new global group that thinks it, acts on it, and
whose debates reveal it, whose actions make it react and the reactions of
which condition the very survival of the collectivity that thinks it and
acts on it. For more than twenty years, we have been speaking and debating
about this, and establishing the basis of what I have called, the Natural
Contract.
Philosophers for whom neither the world nor science exists have criticized
me for dealing with these issues; however that seems to me a very small
price to pay compared with the treatment I should have received. Certainly,
the fact that the politicians themselves are taking these problems
seriously renders such criticisms obsolete. The legal debate has started,
the global collectivity has noted the existence and status of the new
object that, for lack of a better word, we continue to call nature, and by
conferring about it, our leaders have ~de facto~ signed the Natural
Contract.
The task of philosophy is to anticipate the future.
Knowledge and exchange: the given
---------------------------------
I promised to speak of the partnership. The relation between the subject
of knowledge and its object has never been thought in terms of exchange;
instead it was understood that that the active subject took information
from the passive object.
The use of the terms "data" and "given" in philosophy thus reveal that the
objective or external world gives for free and asks nothing in return.
Consequently, the knowledge link becomes parasitical. The subject takes
everything and gives nothing while the object gives everything and receives
nothing. Knowledge is then treated as disinterested in turn. The active or
technical relation to the world exploits it and that is all. We did not
know we were acting as parasites or predators. What appears normal, usual,
commonplace in knowledge or action becomes scandal and abuse as an
exchange. But if legal processes lie at the origin of knowledge, some kind
of equilibrium should be established in the exchange; hence the necessity
of a contract.
All pedagogy consists in making the little human who starts out as a
parasite into a symbiotic partner of a fair exchange. Since he takes, he
must give back in return. In a certain sense, this involves signing a
contract of exchange with his environment, as if he started out his human
and civil life by learning the non-written law. So every pedagogy
presupposes a Contract.
The law that founds symbiosis
-----------------------------
Consequently, we must collectively educate the scholar, the technician,
the politician and the consumer just as we educate our children,
individually from the very start of every education. Late in life, we are
becoming adults of knowledge and action. The relation to knowledge changes
today because of the need for symbiosis with the new object. Exchange is
prior to knowledge. A Contract is required to make this exchange equitable.
Knowledge starts with the law, whose laws precede any discovery of laws;
similarly, technological action starts with the right of exchange. And thus
begins the symbiosis of the global world-object and of the global human
species-subject.
Any change of scale requires an adjustment of concepts.
Master and slave: concerning ancient death
------------------------------------------
The 20th century built global world-objects but could only think in terms
of the old local philosophies. Remember how these philosophies spoke of
power: Hegel calls "master" he who gets closest to death and "slave" he who
stays far away from it. What death are we talking about? Only the earliest
kind, the ancient one. This concern indicates the obsolescence of
philosophies that knew nothing of the lesson of Hiroshima, the possible
collective death of the human species. What can we say about power, that is
to say, politics, when exercising it endangers not only the knight with his
amour, or his family, his tribe, his group or nation, but all of humanity,
the planet included? Here too, the scale has changed. The question of
power concerns not only war and politics, but also technical action and its
tools. And as usual, the law follows death.
The law I propose follows the new death. Certain elements of world opinion
and politics during the next years of the 21st century will be linked to
these legal questions.
And so I prefer Goya's painting the description of which opens _The
Natural Contract_ to the master-slave dialectic. A pair of enemies are
fighting in quicksand. With every blow dealt to the adversary, their legs
sink into the sludge, ever deeper as the energy spent in combat increases.
Since the dawn of history, we have only seen the belligerents in the grand
spectacle of the battle and have only been interested in the question of
who will win or lose, who will become the master by subduing or killing the
slave?
However, the game is no longer played by two parties, but by three; no
longer two subjects, but a pair and the object. Which object? not the local
object of a now trivial debate, but the global habitat; no longer the
individual case, but the universe of things reacting strongly to the
conditions of the struggle. In the past, we signed temporary peace treaties
between belligerents; today we must sign contracts of symbiosis between the
global Earth and the totality of actors. For, in spite of their hatred and
the force of their blows, these actors actually struggle, in agreement and
in unison, with their habitat.
--------------------
Dr. Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon is Associate Professor of Humanities and
Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University,
Vancouver, British Columbia.
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