Figuring Things Out: a General Treatise on Sculpture.

Abstract

There are "materials of hardness and consistency that result from various epochs of civilisation, materials which move in space, have been developed, put into use, and have followed the course of ideas, colliding one against the other, influencing and annihilating one another, mutually fecundating" – thus the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, in his PHD defence (1976) where Michel Serres was among the examinators. Xenakis' document lends itself well for indexing Serres' ideas in an exteriority to his own ouevre because, Serres maintains in said document, Xenakis is the first "to show what a symbol detached from its background actually is". This same enigmatic fascination is arguably also at the very heart of Serres own oeuvre – it underlies his neo-materialist philosophy of natural communication, according to which all things in the universe send, receive, store, and deal/ process information. Xenakis asked in his work as a musician about the essence of these materials and he proposes: "this essence is man’s intelligence, in some way solidified. Intelligence which searches, questions, infers, reveals, foresees – on all levels." He calls these solidifications of intellect "alloys"; mixtures forged by arts and sciences. Serres too maintains a version of a contemporary material intellect, but his version is non-anthropocentric: The intellect is probably co- extensive to the universe, he maintains. With Serres, we can generalise from Xenakis approach by considering data as a massive concentration of what is not symbolical, and hence as an inverse to Xenakis alloys. This generalisation brings with it a novel mechanics and entails interesting consequences for how we can think of time and history. I will elaborate on this by relating two key notions in Serres, that of the Chronopedia and the Grand Récit, to this background. By doing so, I will explore some of the difficult-to-grasp implications of computational methods of chronometric dating (age determination) in astrophysics, which were of such great concern to Serres’ approach to time: Namely that data is not only a 'given', an objective 'observable'; rather, data always entails implicitly the attribution of a massive and universal agedness that is common to all things. Serres foregrounded the importance of this understanding of data in many of his books, and held it out against subjectivist philosophies of history. I will demonstrate how Serres’ approach to thinking time objectively revolves around re-thinking computation in the terms of a circular kind of language that speaks trough constellations of circumstances, like we attribute it to the weather: we should say 'it thinks, like we say 'it rains’, Serres maintains in The Incandescent (2003). I will develop how the implications of these far-ranging ideas that frame Serres’ oeuvre can be better grasped through his insistence, that epistemology today ought to take the form of a general treatise on sculpture. Computational methods involve an 'active' (or 'abductive', for analytic and synthetic) figuring-out of what the data indicates – and this figuring out is what reveals an impersonal kind of logos at work in computation, upon which the edifice of its mathematical form extends; to Serres, this logos is one of philosophy, for it takes the dialog – as a practice of alterity that always pursues a diagonal path – as its canonic format.