Serres’s Philosophy of Media

Abstract

Contemporary French philosopher Michel Serres has out-of-the-rut thoughts about many things, including media. This article focuses on his understanding of the genealogy of media, the notion of exo-Darwinism, and his forward-looking attitude toward new technologies. An alternative, counterintuitive take on human nature is revealed as the discussion proceeds. This article also touches upon what is irreplaceable about humans in an age when artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving.

• I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.—Friedrich Nietzsche
• What is technology? A tremendous acceleration of the time of living things.—Michel Serres
• The lives and actions of our children soon will be conditioned, in fact, by an Earth that we will have programmed, decided upon, produced, and modeled.—Michel Serres
• My body is a machine that turns the objective world into the experienced world.—Maurice Merleau-Ponty

1. Introduction

In the eyes of Vilém Flusser, the Czech-born phenomenologist and philosopher of media, Michel Serres (1930–2019) is one of the most original and powerful historians of science of our time. In the field of media philosophy, Serres’s impact is yet to be widely registered. It is only a matter of time, though, before his singular perspective on media is appreciated far and wide. Given the encyclopedic, unsystematic, holographic, reiterative, literary, musical, and somewhat mercurial nature of his writing, Serres’s philosophy of media needs to be teased out of the vast corpus he left behind. There is nothing mechanical about this kind of gleaning, sifting, and sorting. Whoever takes it upon themself to perform this kind of work will find their sensibility retuned and their worldview transformed.

Before we discuss the details, a few interrelated aspects of Serres’s work deserve mentioning. These are aspects that bear upon his philosophy of media. First, Serres has been developing a philosophy of prepositions, as distinguished from substantives. That is to say, his philosophy has a relational orientation. “Between” is one of the prepositions he problematizes. This orientation is perfectly in line with the philosophy of media. Second, the Platonic concept of khora has a recurrent presence in Serres’s work. As far as I can see, khora is simply a polysemic root metaphor for media, which invites us to view a medium as a receptacle, virgin wax, a winnowing basket, a sieve, a womb, and so on1. Third, between ancient Greek atomism and Flusser’s philosophy of technical images, Serres played the role of a “mediator”. Stated simply, matter as conceived by the atomists is isomorphic with technical images and, one should add, the brain and society, all of which have a Pointillist makeup (the word “individuum”, from which the word “individual” is derived, is simply the Latin equivalent of “atom”). Contra Flusser, Serres would add alphabetic texts to the list, thereby disrupting Flusser’s scheme of periodization, which perceives a paradigm shift between alphabetic writing and technical images. Fourth, Serres is into the cybernetic way of thinking. As such, he is attentive to the feedback loop between the way we talk about the human body and the way we talk about technology. Lastly, whether it is by coincidence or not, a Daoist sensibility is noticeable in Serres’s work.

Taken in a narrow sense, the term “media” encompasses recording media or communication media only. Taken broadly, it encompasses all technology. In line with Marshall McLuhan’s work, this article uses the term in a broad sense, which includes media narrowly conceived. I am aware that it is serviceable to make a distinction, as Flusser does, between tools, machines, and apparatuses, or, as Gilles Deleuze does, between the first, the second, and the third generation of machines (i.e., simple, thermodynamic, and cybernetic machines, respectively, which correspond to Hercules, Prometheus, and Hermes, respectively) instead of using the term “media” indiscriminately, as McLuhan does. But it is beyond the scope of this article to have that discussion2.

If information in a strict sense implies rarity, then what is rare or intriguing about Serres’s philosophy of media? A few things stand out. First, his root metaphor for media differs from McLuhan’s. McLuhan’s genealogy of media revolves around the notions of autoextension, autoamputation, and autoanesthesia, whereas Serres’s genealogy of media is rooted in the notions of autoexternalization, automimesis, and autoevolution. Overall, both of them are humanists. Second, Serres’s philosophy of media is characterized by cybernetic thinking, the centerpiece of which is the feedback loop between media and humans. Most media are anthropomorphic even though some are zoomorphic, such as helicopters (arguably a mimicry of dragonflies) and cranes (the name is telling), or botanomorphic, such as springs (some seeds explode from their pods propelled by coiled springs). That is to say, most media are born of humanity’s understanding of itself. On the other hand, once externalized, media react upon humanity, furthering the process of hominization. Third, Serres’s notion of exo-Darwinism is profoundly significant. If human adaptation can be taken care of technologically, that gives humanity the unparalleled luxury of becoming de-specialized and dedifferentiated. For one thing, having armors, cars, or houses as its exoskeleton, the human body can afford to be soft and defenseless. As technology evolves, humanity has become increasingly dedifferentiated, to the point where it is defined by dedifferentiation, indefinability, infinitude, totipotency, or pure potential. Fourth, like the work of McLuhan and Flusser, Serres’s work furthers the mediumistic study of media in an idiosyncratic way. Contemplating his work through the lens of media philosophy transforms our understanding of human nature and human civilization. Lastly, to risk sounding redundant, instead of treating humanity and media dualistically, Serres holds a monistic view of the two.

As a textual strategy, this article adopts a constellatory manner of presentation. The reader is expected to have leaping legs and a gestaltic or configurational cast of mind. This manner of presentation fits the wide array of motifs well. It also inculcates a mode of cognition that is nonlinear, nondeductive, and that does not offer a ready-made system but shows, instead, the nomadic process of prehending, a process in which long-range vision or a unifying perspective is sacrificed in favor of emergent insights. There is an emergent quality to Serres’s writing, a quality akin to Zen freshness, meaning that he lays bare the indeterminate, probabilistic, precarious process of thought thinking itself up, as distinguished from premeditated, stale thought. The Zen freshness is attributable to the practice of writing in the moment, with short-term memory. To be true to Serres’s modus operandi, the sections that follow are no more than a series of media–philosophical moments in his corpus, which together constitute a plane of consistency nevertheless.

2. The Genealogy of Media

For Serres, culture “is nature itself pursued by other means” [1] (p. 35). In the same vein, a technology/medium is a bodily or mental function served by other means, becoming unrecognizable at each stage. The relatively fragile human body is the primary model of technology/media. “Primary” rather than “sole”, since the wading bird has served as a model for the crane. Unlike McLuhan, who takes media as “extensions of man”, Serres takes each medium as the externalization of a bodily or mental function, or a technological substitute for a human capacity. This understanding is not unlike Bernard Stiegler’s notion of organology. Serres sees the human body as a leaky body, i.e., one that leaks technological objects. By way of a feedback loop, the leaked technologies react upon humanity, precipitating its hominization [1] (p. 188). Humanity conducts autopoiesis not so much by entering into composition with technological objects as by shedding them in the first place. Shedding is primary, whereas taking up is only secondary. If the Daoist loses day by day, or, if Daoist self-fashioning entails losing rather than gaining, then there is something Daoist about humanity as a species. To use another metaphor of Serres’s, technological objects “set sail”, leaving behind a pure and simple human body [1] (p. 188). If technological objects are organs “without” (in the double sense of “not having” and “outside”) bodies, then the human body is a body without organs, since the organs have been externalized one after another. The human body has become radically unfinished. Once reintegrated with its leakages, the human body is potentially global in its reach since some of its leakages (e.g., the mobile phone) are “world-objects” [1] (p. 193).

Between the human body and the technological object, the former has maximum virtuality whereas the latter has maximum actuality. To rephrase the point in analogical form, the human body is to media as the virtual is to the actual. The virtual is maternal, originary, and plural, whereas each medium as an actual is only singular and finite. Suffice it to use the hand vs. the hammer as an example. The hammer is a specific and specialized externalization of the hand, which has the potential to externalize itself in numerous other ways, e.g., in the guise of a rake. The hand is a universal tool, which is to say, it is not a tool. Its essence lies in its infinitude or “anyness”. In this sense, the hand is not only a part of the human body, but also a metaphor for it. Both are de-specialized. To couch it in a Buddhist vocabulary, media are the technological avatars or doubles of our bodily parts. To be fully human is to be maximally undefined and indefinable. One whose job is to tighten nuts nonstop becomes veritably a wrench. In like fashion, one whose job is to click a mouse nonstop becomes a servomechanism of cybernetic systems. That is why the gentleperson does not instrumentalize themself or allow themself to go through a media-becoming.

Initially, we use the language meant for the human body to take account of technology/media. Then, we use the language meant for technology/media to explain corporal functions. Serres points out, “this ceaseless loop feeds back into itself” [1] (p. 188). For good or for ill, what we leak ends up conditioning our existence. “Know thyself” is a sure way to obtain a functional, if not a technical, understanding of the media sphere.

3. Exo-Darwinism

Unlike other species, which evolve to adapt to environmental changes, humans resort to technologies for the same purpose. Stated otherwise, humans have externalized the means of adaptation. Serres calls this process exo-Darwinism [1] (p. 39). Technology evolves at a much faster pace than the evolution of species. Serres uses a vivid language to describe the difference: “The technology-hare overtakes the evolution-tortoise” [1] (p. 39). Technological objects evolve in meteoric time, whereas organisms evolve in geological time [2] (p. 37). In the age of computers and artificial intelligence, technological evolution will accelerate even further. Exo-Darwinism is a species of post-evolution, even though the latter term is open to divergent interpretations. Humankind has entered into autoevolution in the sense that it has taken its evolution into its own hands [3] (p. 146). This process was initiated when humankind started fabricating equivalents to its organs—long before it developed the capacity to edit its genome. McLuhan holds a similar view: “Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind” [4] (p. 67). Exo-Darwinism implies what Paul Virilio calls artificial selection, which eventually will lead to such excesses as the creation of genetic robots and the potential explosion of the unity of the human species [5] (pp. 105–109).

Serres perceives in the technological object an advantage over the corresponding organ it externalizes [3] (p. 145). Instead of carrying a carapace all the time, a human being can put on an armor when needed and take it off afterwards, thus demonstrating a high degree of detachment and flexibility. Equivalent to a detachable breast, the baby bottle can be stored in a refrigerator when not in use. After chasing an animal for a short while, a lion has to rest and pant to let off heat, whereas a human being can simply take off a layer of clothing when overheated and keep on running. Compared to the bodies of other animals, the human body is the least specialized, like an uncarved block, to use a Daoist image.

4. Media Effect

Serres sees the atomic idea and the putting forward of atomism as the effect of the invention of nonideographic alphabets [6] (p. 170). If letters represent indivisible elements of speech, then atoms were taken to be indivisible elements of matter. Serres suggests that ancient Greeks conceived atoms in terms of letters: “atoms are letters” [6] (p. 170). The crucial difference is that matter is three-dimensional and alphabetic writing is one-dimensional (i.e., linear), whereas technical images, made up of dots and intervals, are two-dimensional (i.e., pointillistic). Yoko Ono’s words on dot-drawing apply to technical images: “The dots accumulated into a mass and figures emerged from them”.

Unlike Virilio, whose emphasis is mostly on the loss that accompanies the gain, Serres tends to emphasize the gain that comes with the loss. Writing “freed the cognitive functions from the merciless burden of millions of verses” [1] (p. 183). As a result, “geometry, the child of writing, appeared in its abstract simplicity” [1] (pp. 183–184). Unlike McLuhan, Serres does not detail the “continuous, connected, homogeneous, and static” nature of “visual” or Euclidean space in this context [7] (p. 209). By the same logic, during the Renaissance, printing “relieved scientists of the crushing obligation for documentation”, bringing them back to naked observation, thus giving birth to the experimental sciences, “the children of printing” [1] (p. 184).

In this era, when everybody is like St. Denis, holding their head (i.e., the laptop or the cell phone) in their hands, when artificial intelligence is doing many of the things we used to do, thinking with Serres entails asking the question, “What new ways of using the brain will emerge?”. For one thing, perhaps erudition can be relegated to cybernetic memories. Going meta or rising to higher orders of mental activity seems to be the way to go. For example, if the generation of content can be automated, perhaps humans can dedicate their mental power to evaluating the content. If content evaluation can be automated, perhaps humans can move on to programming the automatic critics. If programming can be automated, perhaps humans can take it upon themselves to critique the programs. In the final analysis, humans can exercise their sovereign power by choosing to withdraw from the game, by opting to not play [1] (p. 186). Our ultimate freedom is most likely negative in nature.

In the eyes of Serres, soft technologies such as writing, printing, and the computer (i.e., externalizations of our cognitive faculties) have had a more fundamental transformative impact on history, behaviors, institutions, and power than hard changes such as labor techniques [8] (p. 71). It is worth mentioning that the soft prevailing over the hard is a Daoist idea, as articulated in Chapter 78 of the Dao De Jing.

5. The Law of Obsolescence

The law of obsolescence is counterintuitive. Superabundance is a sign of obsolescence. On the other hand, what is obsolescent tends to become pervasive, instead of dying out. This pattern has been noticed by McLuhan, Flusser, and Serres alike. When a new medium is invented, instead of displacing the old medium, it tends to reinforce the latter initially. After writing was invented, speech did not disappear but became more articulate. On the other hand, “the voice became the servant of the written” [1] (p. 207). After the printing press was invented, writing not only became typographically more standardized, but also acquired a new motive: to be published. Instead of rendering printers superfluous, the computer has popularized and furthered printing. In the age of secondary orality, writing did not bow out but acquired an oral quality and an ear orientation. As Serres puts it, “Far from killing the preceding ones, the invention of a recording medium renews and spreads them” [1] (p. 177). This is literally a media ecological idea.

6. Glaciers as a Medium

The glaciers of Greenland are like an open book of nature that can be read page by page via drilled core samples, each page revealing the state of the atmosphere in each succeeding year. The record goes back to eras whose dates and memory we have long lost. As long as the glaciers do not disappear, we will continue to have access to this objective book compiled by nature on its own. Serres calls it “a new library inside a refrigerator” [9] (pp. 10–11). Glaciers are simply one of the mediums which innocently preserve the Earth’s memory. This understanding renders fuzzy the boundaries between archaeology, glaciology, geology, and fossilology.

7. Incarnate vs. Discarnate Intelligence

In an age characterized by the symbiosis between artificial and human intelligence, what makes the latter distinct? Serres points out, “Our divine flesh alone distinguishes us from machines; human intelligence can be distinguished from artificial intelligence by the body, alone” [10] (p. 13). This quote calls to mind Leibniz’s point that manmade machines are finite machines whose ultimate components are no longer machines, whereas machines of nature or living beings are different, in the sense that their smallest components are still machines, ad infinitum [11]. If we must call the body a machine, then it is an infinitely refined machine. Human intelligence is distinct because it is incarnate. Artificial intelligence may pass the Turing test. Yet it cannot pass the incarnation test. Perhaps one can say that the body is the inimitable and irreplaceable medium of human intelligence. Virilio makes a good point: “artificial intelligence is a way of discrediting reflection in favor of calculation” [5] (p. 152). Reflection is embodied. To restate the point, human intelligence is vital and “sympathetic” (literally, co-vibrating). There is something Orphic and phenomenological about this understanding.

8. De-Specialization and Dedifferentiation

If regular tools are specialized or finalized, then the opposite is the case with a computer, which is a universal tool that allows one to do anything [1] (p. 50). Strictly speaking, a computer is not a tool but a cybernetic machine. Serres takes the expression “a universal tool” to be an oxymoron [1] (p. 50). “Dedifferentiated” is another word Serres uses to characterize computers [1] (p. 63). When it comes to de-specialization and dedifferentiation, computers are just like the hand, which is used for nothing and everything [1] (p. 64). Serres elaborates, “The [hand] can make itself into a pincer, it can be fist and hammer, cupped palm and goblet, tentacle and suction cup, claw and soft touch. Anything” [12] (p. 34). The idea of “anyness” implies maximum virtuality or “totipotency” (i.e., all-powerfulness) [1] (p. 64). Differentiation exploits, develops, consumes, and eventually exhausts virtuality. Hence Serres’s point, “Difference is our old age” [12] (p. 35). Dedifferentiation, by contrast, is a matter of Daoist rejuvenation since it recovers virtuality. The virtual is the undivided, undifferentiated oneness that is potentially everything, hence the age-old Chinese expression, “One fundament, myriad permutations”. The computer is the one fundament with myriad applications. In the same vein, one can take humanity as the one fundament, and media/technologies as the myriad permutations.

Examples of the undifferentiated or the dedifferentiated are numerous, including the unknown quantity, the general equivalent, the stem cell, humanity as the stem species, the egg as a body without organs (BwO), élan vital, the dancer’s body which has become the joker, the sophist who is wedded to no position in particular and ready to take any position, Proteus, the uncarved block, the blank slate, the Platonic chôra, the virgin wax on which one writes, the beginner’s mind, the Spielraum, silence, the Yi Jing as a meta-medium which has no focal point, and, last but not least, a liberal education, as distinguished from a professional education. [12] (p. 40). This train of thought calls to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s short story, “Who Am I This Time?”.

As far as AI is concerned, de-specialization points in the direction of general AI, as opposed to narrow AI, to state the obvious.

9. The Reversal from Concentration to Distribution

Concentration used to be the order of the day. Computers, as the ultimate tools for concentrating or accumulating, have consummated the compulsion. “The new technologies render the current concentration obsolete” [1] (p. 178). Obsolescence, however, has not kept new sites of concentration from emerging. The Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand, for example, was already obsolescent at the time when it was envisioned. Computer networks have replaced the importance of concentration with distribution. This reversal makes Serres ask, “Do we need to rethink capitalism?” [1] (p. 179). Deleuze already answered this question back in 1990, saying, “nineteenth-century capitalism was concentrative” whereas capitalism in its present form is essentially dispersive [13] (pp. 180–181). The paradigmatic image is no longer the congregation, but the constellation or Indra’s net. Megalomania is giving way to microphilia. Serres makes a notable observation: “We no longer stock things, but rather relations” [1] (pp. 178–179). In a sense, concentration is to distribution as discipline is to control. Means of control make distribution feasible. Distribution also makes control indispensable. Control is the price humanity pays for going beyond discipline. In cyberspace, each book faces the reading public in the guise of its potentially ubiquitous digital double. The reading public is subject to the system’s monitoring and tracking in the guise of “dividuals”, as distinguished from “individuals”. The distinction between discipline and control is more of Deleuze’s preoccupation.

10. The Collectivization and Objectification of Cognitive Faculties

Serres points out, “The new technologies render the old cognitive faculties collective and objective, faculties we believed to be personal and subjective” [1] (p. 185). Memory is among these faculties. The new technologies are quite ambivalent. While feeding egocentrism and narcissism, they also undermine the private and individualism, which is not ahistorical, after all. The hive mind has become a tangible reality. Driving is oftentimes a matter of functioning in function of a navigation system, to use Flusser’s signature phraseology. Problem solving often becomes a matter of searching for a ready answer tucked away somewhere in cyberspace. Instead of reading the sky, we check an app on the phone to find out about the weather for the next few hours.

While others may bemoan human deskilling and the potential extinction of independent work, Serres shows appreciation for not having to reinvent the wheel and the opportunity to spend the freed-up mental power on discoveries and inventions. Externalizing cognitive faculties as collectively accessible technological objects only creates the empty space for new cognitive faculties to emerge. The collectivization and objectification of cognitive faculties point in the direction of mental ecology, mental symbiosis, and a dialectic between loss and gain. In the age of big data, the amount of recording and processing simply goes beyond the human scale, making the collectivization and objectification of cognitive faculties indispensable.

11. The Duodecimal System

The metric system is arguably an externalization of our ten fingers. If so, then it is a humanistic system, which does not make it universal. Serres points out, “The metric system, useful enough for measuring straight lines, is useless for circles. And since technology most often works in circles, the metric system is useless—it would be better to agree to a basis of duodecimals. A circle is a dozen, quite simply” [14] (p. 24). The clock is the most obvious example. Both the metric and the duodecimal system are used in China, as evidenced by the Ten Heavenly Stems and the Twelve Earthly Branches. The latter correspond to the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac. Twelve years make a cycle.

12. Topological Space

Instantaneous, mobile communication technology makes distance irrelevant. As Serres has it, “We no longer inhabit geometry, the Earth or measurement, but a topology without metric or distance, a qualitative space” [1] (p. 154). He points out further, “Formerly an abstract science, topology describes the space of our habitat quite concretely” [1] (p. 205). Topological space is mythic, non-Euclidean, relational. It is a space of encounters. To use Serres’s words, “The category of between is fundamental in topology and for our purposes here: to interdict in the rupture and cracks between varieties completely enclosed upon themselves” [15] (p. 45). The technologically induced topological space we inhabit nowadays is characterized by immediacy, ubiquity, and instantaneity. Serres points out, “The omnipresence allowed by the new topological space brings orality back” [1] (p. 206). Existentially, Virilio is averse to such a space: “A world of immediacy and simultaneity would be absolutely uninhabitable” [16] (p. 37). Architecturally, however, he experiments with topological space, seeing ruled forms and surfaces as “a kind of geometric academicism” [5] (p. 29). His particular concern “was to enter into topology, in other words, into non-Euclidean spaces, to use vague forms, including at the level of the floor” [5] (p. 29). The distinction between metric and topological space calls to mind another couple of distinctions: striated vs. smooth space theorized by Deleuze and Guattari [17] (pp. 474–500), and visual vs. acoustic space theorized by McLuhan [7] (pp. 206–224). As with space, so with time. The concept of topological space also calls to mind Deleuze’s notion of occupying without counting (or measuring) [18] (pp. 297–304).

13. Mediation as Transformation

Serres sees Hermes (messenger, exchanger, and parasite) as the god of media, “which produce a third reality, independent of the one we hold as real” [19] (p. 114). This is a recurrent motif in Serres’s work. As he puts it elsewhere: “Words spray an anaesthetic cloud over things and drug us to spare us the terror of the real [20] (p. 201). Neither a mirror nor a transparent window, a medium is more like a veil. Mediation is a process of transformation, rather than one of transportation or transmission. As Serres puts it, “As soon as we are two, there is a medium between us, the light ray is lost in the air, the message is lost in the interceptions, there is only a space of transformation” [21] (p. 70). The system is regulated by neither the host nor the guest but the parasite, or by neither the sender nor the receiver but the medium. “As in life, the parasites hold everything” [1] (p. 168).

14. World-Objects

Serres calls those tools (e.g., laptops and mobile phones) at least one dimension of which attains the extension of one of the world’s dimensions “world-objects” [1] (p. 193). Due to our world-objects, “the world is becoming technologized and culturalized” [1] (p. 142). Serres offers a few other examples: the atomic bomb, satellites, the Web, nuclear waste, and nanotechnologies [22] (pp. 14–15). Nanotechnologies most likely refer to microchips, which very often contain information from all over the world. The Buddhist saying, “A flower enfolds an entire world”, captures the logic. A Buddhist couplet is worth contemplating here:

A single moon appears in all waters.

All moons-in-water are retracted by a single moon3.

The first line applies to a satellite, signals from which can be replicated in devices around the world. The second line applies to a server. Identical images showing up on all terminals may point back to the same file in it. This technical interpretation obviously trivializes the spiritual message of the couplet.

The couplet lends itself to other interpretations, including the following one, which takes us back to the genealogy of media:

Our pure and simple body appears in all media.

All media return to our pure and simple body.

This interpretation places Serres’s philosophy of media in a nutshell. The second line is simply a restatement of the following quote: “Returning to their corporal source, tools become organs again” [3] (p. 152). The coincidence is totally unplanned for.

15. Closing Remarks

The notion of media as externalizations of our bodily or mental functions places Serres squarely in the camp of humanists. The notion is not unlike McLuhan’s point that all our artifacts “are outerings and utterings of man” [23] (p. 7). McLuhan goes so far as to say, “The most human thing about us is our technology” [4] (p. 172). If, as Serres indicates, technology reacts upon our body–mind, precipitating its hominization, then McLuhan’s point simply makes sense, since it is technology that makes us increasingly human. If the human body–mind is the model or prototype of media, then media are metaphors for our bodily or mental functions, giving us insight into them. A feedback loop of mutual illumination has taken shape between humans and media. The larger point is that Serres’s philosophy of media is both humanistic and cybernetic.

The more we understand about ourselves, the more the technosphere starts to make sense, and the more we become capable of externalizing ourselves. The five senses (an allusion to the title of one of Serres’s books) and the twelve systems of the human body are simply starting points. On the other hand, our externalizations will condition us, and become our habitat and second nature, pun intended.

The idea of exo-Darwinism is highly compatible with the notion of technological vitalism furthered by André Leroi-Gourhan [17] (p. 407). Technologies/media have their phyla and lineages and form an ecosystem. By the logic of exo-Darwinism, as anti-irritants, technologies evolve to keep humans well adapted. Paradoxically, humans participate in the ecology of technologies/media as inventive reproductive systems of the latter, putting exo-Darwinism (i.e., the evolution of technologies) on steroids, accelerating its pace, enlarging the gap between human biology and technologies, turning technologies into irritants instead. We are being kept busy, anxious, and ill-adapted by our technologies, and end up getting trapped into the vicious circle of seeking technological fixes, which always generate new problems.

Theoretically speaking, having specialized technologies may serve to keep us de-specialized, but designers have to think specialized thoughts to produce specialized technologies in the first place. In our era, people are no longer specialized in a simple way. Rather, everybody has to face the challenge of becoming specialized in plural ways, instead of becoming de-specialized and enjoying being fully human.

Westerners and the Chinese feel differently about technology reacting upon the self. The gardener in “Heaven and Earth” of the Zhuangzi said to Zigong (one of Confucius’s disciples):

“I heard from my teacher that someone who has a machine will surely have machine things to do, and someone who has machine things to do is sure to have a machine-like mind. When one harbors a machine-like mind in one’s breast, his pure simplicity [chunbai] becomes impaired, and when one’s pure simplicity is impaired, his spiritual life becomes unstable. One whose spiritual life is unstable won’t be supported by the Dao [24]” (p. 243)

This is where Serres’s thought and Daoism subtly diverge from each other, even though both point in the direction of pure simplicity. Serres emphasizes the possibility of achieving pure simplicity through technology, whereas Daoism advocates conserving pure simplicity without technology.

As a result of this philosophical wariness toward technology, the Chinese had preserved an effectively simple but virtually rich way of life until the borders of the nation were forced open by Western powers in the 19th century. In this era, when technologies have turned from anti-irritants to irritants, it is crucial that humans exercise prudence as to what technologies/media to “outer and utter”. At a time when the ecological crisis is ominously worsening, technophilia is no longer a species of innocent, harmless narcissism. Instead, we should view technologies/media, as Serres does, as no better than excretions with which we pollute the world in order to appropriate it [2].