Abstract
Reviewed by Tim Howles , University of Oxford, UK
What will the critic of tomorrow look like? What kind of body will she inhabit? Through what eyes will she see? What kind of physical material will she grasp with her fingers and manipulate with her hands in order to communicate her ideas? And, moreover, through what cognitive arrangement will she perceive the world around her? Can we assume, for example, that she will synthesize intuitions by means of the same rationality, the same cogito, as we do today – or, at least, as we think we do?
In this short book, first delivered as a lecture to the Académie Française in 2011 and here translated into English, French philosopher Michel Serres peers into the mist that lies ahead in an attempt to discern the outline of this figure as she begins to coalesce before him. She is to be named Thumbelina (Petite Poucette), an honorific granted on account of the dexterity of her thumbs as they freely and nimbly glide over the screen of her smartphone, a device that is constantly in her hands (Serres prefers the feminine form over its masculine equivalent, Tom Thumb, or Petit Poucet, claiming from his own experience that young women demonstrate greater development in this regard than their male counterparts). Although thumbelina is a reality that is still-to-come, she is also a reality in our midst: she is one of the networked generation, those who engage with the world through technology in novel, creative, and (for us) highly unspecified ways. As an octogenarian who has taught for decades in the context of both the French and the North American university systems, Serres appreciates that he has presided over the advent of thumbelina. And yet, eschewing the curmudgeonly tone typically associated with the parental generation as it repudiates what it has itself spawned, he declares himself proud to have acted as her midwife. In fact, his book represents “a love letter” (9) in celebration of her arrival. Why? Because, for Serres, thumbelina represents a fresh and necessary incarnation of humanity. Or, more strongly still, with her comes the ‘Gospel’ (9), the in-breaking of an entirely new human self. Serres’ argument is that the young people in our schools and universities, engaging in ever expanding digital networks and communicating with each other by means of virtual transmissions, represent a historical aperture, ‘one that is comparable to the more visible ruptures of the Neolithic, the beginning of the Christian era, the end of the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance’ (10). For Serres, thumbelina possesses nothing less than a new interiority. He anticipates that, through her, a new historical epoch will arise, one that will be more democratic and more ecological than our own. In her wake, everything will change.
This book takes its place in the ‘third’ phase of Serres’ career (Connor, 2009), a phase that can be traced to the publication of Hominescence (Serres, 2001), in which Serres begins to chart a process of ‘hominization’ out of which a new humanity is beginning to emerge. In Thumbelina, this is figured in terms of the notion of “exteriorization.” Serres recounts the legend of Saint Denis of Paris, as reported by the medieval chronicler Jacques de Varagine in his Légende Dorée. Having been beheaded at the foot of Montmartre by his Roman captors, the legend narrates how the decapitated body of Denis rose up on its feet, to the dismay of those in attendance, and continued its march up the hill, severed head in hands. In the same way, thumbelina, upon opening her laptop, functions with her head held outside her body, in the form of the vast repository of information contained on the web, to which she has access at the click of a button. Liberated in this way from the burden of information storage, which is now held on an external hard drive, thumbelina has available to her an entirely new form of cognition, one that is not tainted by the categories of thought bequeathed by Enlightenment rationality (which, for Serres, were primarily concerned with techniques for the responsible ordering of a vast array of data). If raw information can be held outside her head, thumbelina has within her grasp a “luminosity” (26) that will render her, for the first time in human history, authentically “intelligent” (19). The critical task for the generation-to-come, then, undergirded by the digital revolution, will morph from stultifying, atrophic exercises of analysis to multiple, creative acts of invention.
Serres’ concern in this book is not just to identify this new generation of human beings. His writing also slips into augury: for now that she is here, how will thumbelina begin to challenge and overturn the society in which she participates? Take, for example, the old models of authority and control, as embodied in institutions of education (master/pupil), politics (ruler/governed), health (specialist/patient), and religion (priest/lay). These societal roles will increasingly find themselves undermined by thumbelina’s voice: the ‘noise’ that she emits – ‘noise’ being a key term in Serres’ writing to designate that which precedes or escapes differentiation (cf. Serres, 1982) – is such that eventually it will no longer be possible to hear the monological voice of traditional power structures above the din.
Raucous it may be, the ‘brouhaha’ (27) that accompanies thumbelina wherever she goes – her constant chatter, online and offline – is not the meaningless babble of a generation that has lost its capacity for serious thought. Rather, wherever it is heard, her voice sounds a furious call for epistemological democracy. Thumbelina is no longer prepared to be subjugated, serf-like, in a demos that prefers abstraction over particularity and unity over aggregation. Instead, with a quasi-algorithmic rigor, thumbelina insists upon the recognition of reality as multiple and plural. A banal observation buried in the comments section of an obscure website may not appear to be a substantial contribution to the treasury of human knowledge, but, as far as Serres is concerned, it constitutes a gesture of identification, a demand to be recognized as a this or a that, as a quality and as an essence (69). If thumbelina is anonymous in the crowd, her anonymity might be likened to that of the “unknown soldier” buried at Westminster Abbey whose very anonymity encodes massive societal, cultural, and religious significance and around whose tomb aspirations for peace are emboldened.
Some of the most effective passages in the book describe the bankruptcy of the institutions in which thumbelina is currently housed. They will not last for long; or, to use Serres’ own image, they are the equivalent of distant constellations from which light is still reaching us, but which actually burnt out long ago (61). For Serres, even the physical topography of our contemporary institutions will be disrupted and overturned by thumbelina. Formerly, in the classroom, in the court of law, on an airplane, or in church, people have found themselves arranged in rows or in pews, eyes forward, like prisoners in the Platonic cave, piloted, slouched, passive, and inert. But now, those rigid spaces are exploding. Thumbelina is constantly circulating, gesticulating, and frolicking, a cognitive agility that is mimicked in the dance of her thumbs as they type out messages and manipulate digital images. She is constantly on the move. She embodies motricity. As such, she cannot be made subject to the hegemonic gesture of the headcount, which is exemplified in contemporary society by the phenomenon of the poll: “the voter who counts for one in the opinion polls, or the TV viewer who counts for one in the Nielsen ratings” (69). Simply put, thumbelina does not sit still long enough to be polled.
Serres’ work – allusive, fleet of foot, mischievous, and highly resistant to the parsimony of paraphrase – certainly presents a stylistic challenge to the reader (a challenge that is appropriately conveyed in this translation by its punchy, staccato rendering of the original text). Moreover, in this late stage of his writing career, Serres is striving increasingly to provide a local application of ideas that have been worked out in a more global fashion elsewhere in his corpus, resulting in a theoretical underpinning that might seem somewhat provisional to a reader new to his work. And yet, in its augury of a new generation to follow, one that will quite literarily think in a new way, and for whom entirely new institutions will need to be devised, this book presents a stimulating challenge to critical research on religion in contemporary society. In this regard, it might be read constructively in dialogue with that of French sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour who, in his recent Inquiry into Modes of Existence, has begun a collaborative project to map out the significance of religion in a society that has misappropriated its Enlightenment inheritance and can no longer understand the forms of rationality that are emerging from its midst (Latour, 2013). For Latour, just as for Serres, the institutions in which our values are currently housed are no longer fit for purpose and await renegotiation by a new generation that is able to think critically according to a pluralist ontology.
The most fruitful conceptual stimulus to those engaged in critical research on religion may prove to be Serres’ subtle tracing of the genealogy by which thumbelina comes into being at this particular moment in history. For example, Serres’ notion of “exteriorization,” as described earlier, indexes the work of French anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, in particular his two volume Gesture and Speech, in which he argues that the development of religion is made possible by the “extériorisation artificielle” of humans vis-à-vis their environment, that is, by the way in which humans can “outsource” their lives by means of technological advances, thereby liberating an interior space in which religious (as well as social and cultural) identities can emerge (Leroi-Gourhan, 1965). But more significantly, the notion reveals Serres’ longstanding interaction with the ideas of René Girard, with whom he has maintained a close intellectual (and personal) relationship since the 1970s. Girard presents a bifocal diagnostic of contemporary religion: on the one hand, there is the vestigial economy of “sacred” religion, which is a primordial human collective marked by scapegoating violence; on the other hand, there is a new economy brought about by the victim perspective of Judeo-Christian Scripture (Girard, 1978). The historical shift described by Serres maps onto Girard’s diagnostic. For Serres, the parental generation forms a collective that is founded on the Girardian sacred: obsessed with ownership rights and global hegemony, this is the generation that caused the bloodshed and war that has blighted post-Enlightenment Europe (Serres, 2008). How ironic, then, that this is the generation that flippantly accuses thumbelina of egoism and self-absorption, of being atomised or disconnected, of belonging nowhere, as she stares into her computer screen. For it is precisely by dwelling in a non-localized topography (thumbelina inhabits, we might say, “the cloud”) that this new generation is able to form a collective that is not characterized by the Girardian sacred. The process of “exteriorization” will result, Serres claims, in the proliferation of a benign power in the world to come, one that will be more cognizant of the status of powerless victims: thus, “when I weigh the harm done by what grumpy old men call ‘egoism’ against the crimes committed by and for the libido of belongings – hundreds of millions of deaths – I love these young people to death” (9). For Serres, thumbelina has the potential to embody a properly ethical society. In light of that prediction, the role and configuration of religion within such a society is one that needs to be taken up and critically examined.