Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, and Fictions of the Enlightenment

Abstract

This essay argues the chaotic, violent, and truly Lucretian implications of Michel Serres’s attack on the Empire of Signs is moderated and localized by Bruno Latour—figured more as a digital field or network than as the meteorology of “deep wells, chimneys of thunderous acceleration, rendings, gaps” that Serres associates with the unpredictable drift of modernity. Latour tries to stabilize the non-metrical energy of Epicurean clinamina as cross-references arranged on a grid. The confidence of his tabulation stands in contrast to the effects of exigent powers escaping human self-mastery in Serres’s account of invariances such as the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle. Similarly the ecstatic isolation of early experimentalists amidst the pressure and traction of pure sensation is a far cry from the mute Parliament of Things Latour spotted in Robert Boyle’s laboratory, whose vocalization he superintends under the aegis of representation, a word with a strange career in the history of civil society.