Michel Serres, Henri Bergson and ‘Retardation’

Bill Ross

This notion of delay in communication is a capital notion1 Michel Serres

Two alternatives suggest themselves for the genesis of phenomena, of original actualisation on a cosmological scale, two problems which on the face of it should offer quite different solutions: Firstly, we might assume the initial condition to be one of highly elevated activity, an infinitely fast miscegenation of all cause upon all cause, each and all co-extensive with the entirety of Being or Becoming, all in rhapsodic im- mediate propagation; how does this state of affairs come to disentangle, to stagger and differentiate its own single hyperspeed into the multivarious time- signatures of the phenomena we observe around us? Or, again, if rather there were some primordial stasis at the beginning of everything, how did this transition to relative movement, how did the channels arise which allotted this lane fast and that lane slow? How did some catatonic equilibrium which should by rights have been terminal, shiver into becoming? How does the exchange of a photon acquire its own relative speed, and in what way does the accretion of a galaxy do the same thing? These are two cosmological beginnings, two Chaoses which seem at first to be at odds with each other, with separate attendant questions: for the first, the question is, ‘how do things delimit their speed?’; while for the second, ‘how do things quit stasis?’. I will maintain that these are in fact not necessarily the mutually exclusive propositions they appear to be; this is a line of argument which will be examined through the nuanced tensions between two natural philosophers, Michel Serres and Henri Bergson, taking cues from their respec- tive interpretations of the work of Lucretius. Bergson’s Extraits de Lucrèce avec un commentaire, des notes et une étude sur la poésie, la philosophie, la physique, le texte et la langue de Lucrèce2 and Serres’ The Birth of Physics.3 For both it is a question seen through the lens of thermodynamics, though the difference between their respective positions on the matter will hopefully serve to clarify

1 Serres 1968, 20 fn.: “Cette notion de retard dans la communication est une notion capitale …” (my translation) 2 Bergson 1884. 3 Serres 2018.

© Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2020 | doi:10.30965/9783846765142_012 176 Bill Ross what is at stake. More particularly, there is a key concept to be found in each thinker’s work which I believe forms the hub around which our questions turn; in French, the word is ‘décalage’, for which we shall adopt ‘retardation’. Embedded within this concept, I will argue, is the ambiguous identity of our two questions on delimitation and stasis. By extension, it serves to throw light on the different but intimately related philosophical instincts of these two thinkers. For Bergson, the problematic is set out in his first published work; a commentary on selections from Lucretius’ De rerum natura, The Nature of Things, presented as an introduction and footnotes to extracts from the Latin. With hindsight, anyone familiar with Bergson’s own work can identify a certain early consolidation of his antipathetic attitude toward deterministic modes of thinking; Lucretian atomism represents for him just such a standpoint. While noting the beauty of Lucretius’ natural imagery and his passion for nature, he attributes to him a fatalistic bent;

We [sympathetic readers of Lucretius] perceive things from without, in their pic- turesque aspect; we believe that they succeed and replace each other at the incli- nation of their own whim; but reflection, science show us that each one of them could have been mathematically foreseen, since each is the fated consequence of that which preceded. Here is the presiding idea of Lucretius’ poem. Nowhere is it explicitly formulated, but the poem in its entirety serves only to develop it. Nature is engaged, now and forever, in the invariable application of the same laws; she is engaged therein by a kind of contract, foedus, and this contract is eternal. (Bergson 1884, Introduction, vi)4

To this generally fatalistic and deterministic picture, Bergson adds a gloss;

It follows from this that each cause produces only a determined effect. (Bergson 1884, Introduction, vi)5

Bergson is identifying a principle, a foedus he says, employing Lucretius’ word. It is eternal, ubiquitous and uninterrupted in the deterministic causal chain. It precludes creativity. In short, it leaves no place for the vital as that idea will

4 “Nous apercevons les phénomènes du dehors, dans ce qu’ils ont de pittoresque; nous croyons qu’ils se succèdent et se remplacent au gré de leur fantaisie; mais la réflexion, la science nous montrent que chacun d’eux pouvait être mathématiquement prévu, parce qu’il est la con- séquence fatale de ce qui était avant lui. Voilà l’idée maîtresse du poème de Lucrèce. Nulle part elle n’est explicitement formulée, mais le poème tout entier n’en est que le développe- ment. La nature s’est engagee, une fois pour toutes, a appliquer invariablement les mêmes lois; elle s’y est engagee par une espece de contrat, fœdus, et ce contrat est eternel” (my translation) 5 “Il résulte de là que chaque cause ne produit qu’un effet déterminé.” (my translation)