While I work my way through several pieces
of plant research, as well as a book that I had overlooked, I offer for
consideration a couple of paragraphs from a forthcoming publication, which I
have modified slightly for the sake of comprehensibility:
The idea of making a pact with nature
seems impossible at first. How can two agents strike an agreement when one of
them clearly cannot even talk, let alone think, or act consciously, at least
when viewed from a human perspective? The point is irrelevant, Michel Serres
argues. After all, the social contract is tacit and unspoken and so should be
the natural one. Son of a bargeman and a former merchant marine, Serres extols
the ability of peasants and sailors to read nature not through words but
through lines, noting that the English word “draft” works as both a noun and a
verb, referring to contracts as well as the act of pulling, and the lines, of
words and of fiber, that make each one possible. The administrators, managers
and scientists who currently run the world have long lost their capacity to understand
nature because they are no longer in daily contact with it, no longer dependent
upon it, and no longer capable of negotiating with it. They have let loose the
strings that once connected them to it and can no longer feel, let alone
understand, the chordal vibrations through which nature speaks. Channeled into
narrow fields of expertise and attentive to immediate needs, modern
administrators form bonds with nature that are instrumental and temporary
rather than mutual and enduring. With the onset of climate change and growing
human acknowledgment of it, these cords have reappeared and the skeins of
discourse have multiplied and thickened, but not nearly to extent needed to
avoid global catastrophe, in Serres’ opinion. A better vision might now be in
place but the old mechanisms at hand are still inadequate to achieve it. Serres
recommends fuzzy sets as the proper model as they offer the needed flexibility
and mutability in their many interstices and gaps. Strength lies in the
plurality and uncertainty of their form, which is more like a rope than a rod.
The cords of relation that Serres
envisions as the clauses of the natural contract serve three purposes: they
attach, they inform and they delimit. Imagining the harpedonaptae of the Nile
River delta, the rope-stretchers who would measure and mark agricultural fields
following each flood, he sees cords as the perfect instruments. Hanging loosely
they connect human subjects and contain the law that binds the social world.
Stretched taut they transfer that law to the earth and therefore attach the
natural world to the social one. But the bonds are flexible. The harpedonaptae
knew they could do their work only after the river flooded and receded, so they
made the cords slack and taut accordingly, knowing that the soft power of
relations was more durable than the hard power of technology; knowing when to
give (loosen) and when to take (tighten) was essential. Levees and damns
inevitably give way to the forces of nature, permanence having been mistakenly ascribed
to them. Much more durable is a recurring social-technological system of
partitioning and the cords that facilitate it, the flexibility and mutability
of the instrument matching the flexibility and mutability of the relation
between people and river. The ways of nature may be ultimately unknowable, but
Serres sees an elegance in not knowing. In place of total knowledge and total
mastery, he suggests a system of ignorance with acceptance, a relation
characterized by polite indifference being preferable to a prying intrusion.
His is a call to respect the unknown, to have a cautious relation to the
obscure.
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