Introduction to Serres on Transdisciplinarity

As part of what Patrice Maniglier describes as the ‘transversal adventure’ of French thought of the 1960s (2011: 20), Michel Serres’s early works can be read as a series of internal displacements of one discipline by another, engaging philosophy in a permanent decentring. At the convergence of structuralism, cybernetics and the history of science, Serres uncovered two principal transdisciplinary logics: one tied to idealities (abstract forms), the other to the empirical domain (concrete information). Since Serres was not only interested in relations between or across disciplines, but more broadly in the way information is conduced from one systemic entity to another, his ‘transdisciplinarity’ can also be described as a general theory and practice of translation, textual or empirical. Each of the five Hermès volumes, which collect texts that Serres wrote between 1961 and 1980, sheds a different light on the problem of trandisciplinarity. At times identifying a space, at other times, a specific relation between ‘regions’, each volume needs to be grasped through this double perspective. ¹ Yet when it comes to assessing Serres’s conception of transdisciplinarity in any precise way, an important difficulty arises, stemming from his tie to Leibniz’s philosophy, and to classical thought more generally. As a matter of fact, Serres voluntarily oscillates between the standpoint of trans-disciplinarity and that of a- (or pre-) disciplinarity. Rather than straightforwardly ‘acritical’ (Latour, 1987), his philosophy subverts the Kantian ‘limits’ into a topology of limits as borders, points of passage and interactions. In other words, the constitution of his ‘transdisciplinarity’ can only be unstable, constantly put into question by the change of ‘scales’ of these maps, by the transformation of the very entities between which relations can be established.

Serres’s encounter with Leibniz’s philosophy proved to be a watershed in his elaboration of the problem of transdisciplinarity, providing it with a structural and systematic framework. His doctoral thesis Le système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques (1968) interprets Leibniz’s system as an ‘exemplary architecture’. This structure is exemplary because it is fully coherent and fundamentally pluralist at the same time. Organized by a multiplicity of principles of coherence, it is not only made of analytic logic (formal language) but also contains a morphology, topology or aesthetics (language of forms) (Serres, 1974: 117). Besides the classical deductive sequences, Leibniz’s system is constituted by a transversal logic of forms, which transcends the frontiers of particular areas of knowledge. Serres’s demonstration relies on showing how Leibniz’s mathematical models were translated through various regions of the Encyclopaedia, regardless of their eligibility for a higher principle of disciplinary partition (philosophy, biology, law, theology…). At the same time, each of these models can be ascribed a fundamental transdisciplinary logic of generalization, a capacity to produce transversal, total views of the system. In Leibniz’s system, the ‘inside’ of any given region is fundamentally exogenous. Hence the concept of ‘relative exteriority’, in the passage translated below.

By thinking of the system as a ‘structure’ involving a multiplicity of ‘models’, Serres was problematizing the very notion of disciplinarity from a precritical point of view. Leibniz’s multiple attempts at creating ‘universal characteristics’ and a mathesis universalis are the most evident expressions of this. Prior to the segmentation of knowledge, representation, not yet under the glare of critique, constituted a liminal space from which to reason, a space where logics and analogy, the logics of science and that of images, were knitted together with rigour. ² But this ‘prior’ could as well be transformed into an ‘after’: behind his exegesis of Leibniz, Serres was in fact addressing contemporary science and its various transdisciplinary logics or ‘states of interference’ (Serres, 1972).

Another crux of Serres’s early writings was to overcome philosophy’s pretention to rule over the sciences and the corresponding assertion of science’s autonomy. By claiming the autonomy of science, Serres was appropriating and generalizing a proposition that had emerged from the philosophy of mathematics, and had been channelled through the French epistemological tradition since the 1930s. According to Jean Cavaillès, the crisis of the fundaments and the birth of ‘modern algebra’ had revealed that mathematics possessed an autonomous becoming, thereby embodying a singular form of historicity (Cavaillès, 1960 [1939], 2011 [1947]). As Serres would summarize it, mathematics evolves by producing its own theory, each time inventing, by transversal generalization, a new ‘globalizing’ language, which nevertheless remains intrinsic to mathematics (Serres, 1968a: 78–112). For him, every science ‘speaks’; every science produces its own self-sufficient epistemology. By renaming epistemology a ‘language’, Serres highlights the internal or endogenous character of his method, ³ by opposition to an overbearing conception of theory. He considers that transdisciplinarity or translation best approaches the movement of science itself: ‘The new new [scientific] spirit is about thinking without reference; transport is thought itself ’ (Serres, 1972: 15–16).

First published in Hermès III, La Traduction (1974), the following excerpt summarizes a number of these developments in a highly condensed manner, at the same time as it marks Serres’s shift away from structuralism. In this passage, Serres draws a general typology of philosophy’s main ways of addressing, and situating itself towards, science. Whereas philosophy’s relation to science remains generally caught up in a representational paradigm, or perhaps in what Althusser called the ‘philosophy of seeing’ (Althusser et al., 1996 [1965]: 35), the pre-disciplinary philosophy of Leibniz speaks science without discrepancy; in it, science is not an object of knowledge but a medium. In a surprising move, Serres thus inverts the history of philosophy: Leibniz’s pre-critical ‘naivety’ unmasks the naivety of a critique of metaphysics that ends up restoring a new kind of philosophy in its place, rather than leaping into science. By ‘transdisciplinary exteriority’, Serres means a language that translates the knowledge of science into its own terms and truth conditions, a standpoint of transversal generalization or structure – in other words, a structuralism. Formerly celebrated, this practice of relative exteriority, because it preserves an ineliminable discrepancy between method and its object, is now presented as structuralism’s essential flaw.