Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time : Michel Serres with Bruno Latour (Studies in Literature and Science)

Rating:
Summary: Undisciplined Thought Par-Excellence
Review: Reading Serrres before this book was something of an adventure... You never know in advance quite what to get out of a reading of his work. Now, being able to flesh out all of the vaguenesses of his work with a general outline of this man's mind, I am more perplexed than ever. He comes across as very childlike in many respects and also very WEIRD. Seemed like Latour was humoring him in some parts as well. I admire Serres just as much having read this, if ony because he is stepping off onto a ledge in attempts to perhaps create something entirely (? ) original in the history of philosophical thought.

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating excursion on science and meaning.
Review: Science is full of magic and myth. But so-called "primitive" people are also very scientific. So what is the difference between modern and primitive, between science and magic? Maybe not as much as we have been led to think.Michel Serres is a wild, marginal philosopher whose 20 dense, often obscure books try to break down the boundaries between science, culture, and art. Bruno Latour is an anthropologist of scientists, author of pathbreaking studies of the strange and unscientific, almost magical, work of laboratory scientists. Here we have a series of five deep, clear, and often playful conversations between the two. No jargon, fast pace, a peek at two brilliant minds on the key issues in science and literature. They both know their science--Serre started as a mathematician--and neither are Luddites who want to tear science down. But both argue that science often conceals more than it reveals, and they show how both science and arts build barriers between human beings and nature, for example, or between the present and the past, the modern and the primitive. One of Serres' best examples of how little difference there is between science and religion is his comparison between the science of a Carthaginian sacrificial rite (where children were killed inside a giant bronze statue) and the magic of the space program (where astronauts died inside a giant machine). BL ...it seems to me that there is a double test---first you link Baal and the Challenger, then they have to exchange their properties in a symmetrical fashion. We are supposed to understand the Carthaginians' practice of human sacrifice by immersing ourselves in the Challenger event, but, inversely, we are supposed to understand what technology is through the Carthaginian religion. MS Yes, the reasoning is more or less symmetrical...We could construct a kind of dictionary that would allow us to translate, word by word, gesture by gesture, event by event, the scene at Cape Canaveral into the Carthaginian rite, and vice versa...the respective cost of the operation, comparable for the two communities, the immense crowd of spectators, the specialists who prepare it and who are apart from the rest, the ignition, the state-of-the-art machinery in both cases, given the technology of the two eras, the organized or fascinated rehearsal of the event, the death of those enclosed in the two statues, whose size dominates the surrounding space, the denial...--"No those aren't humans, but cattle," cry even the fathers of the incinerated children in Carthage; "No," we say "it wasn't on purpose, it wasn't a sacrifice, but an accident," inevitable, even calculable, through probabilities....The series of substitutions functions exactly like stitches, like mending a tear, like making a nice tight overcast seam...Each term of the translation passes on a piece of thread, and at the end it may be said that we have followed the missing hyphens between the two worlds. Baal is in the Challenger, and the Challenger is in Baal; religion is in technology; the pagan god is in the rocket; the rocket is in the statue; the rocket on its launching pad is in the ancient idol---and our sophisticated knowledge is in our archaic fascinations." (159-160). BL "But you are always tripping up your readers; you are always operating simultaneously on two opposing fronts. When they think they are reading about collective society, you bring them back to things, and then, when they think they are reading about the sciences, you bring them back to society. They go from Baal to the Challenger and then from the Challenger to Baal!" MS "Its a magnificent paradox, which I savor. To walk on two feet appears to mean tripping everyone up. Is this proof, then, that we always limp?" (142) MS "All around us language replaces experience. The sign, so soft, substitutes itself for the thing, which is hard. I cannot think of this substitution as an equivalence. It is more of an abuse and a violence. The sound of a coin is not worth the coin; the smell of cooking does not fill the hungry stomach; publicity is not the equivalent of quality; the tongue that talks annuls the tongue that tastes or the one that receives and gives a kiss." (p. 132) MS "There is no pure myth except the idea of a science that is pure of all myth." (p. 162)