Michel Serres' The Quasi-Object: Hunt-the-slipper

Today in class, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what whether or not the quasi-object is a "hybrid," which would help us understand quasi-objects. For his part, although he cites Serres, does not do a great job explaining the quasi-object. In We Have Never Been Modern, he writes,

"Of quasi-objects, quasi-subjects, we shall simply say that they trace networks. They are real, quite real, and we humans have not made them. But they are collective because they attach us to one another, because they circulate in our hands and define our social bond by this very circulation" (Latour 89, italics mine)

I tried to emphasize that the main feature of quasi-objects was its circulation through a very loose reference to Serres' introduction of the concept in his astounding book, The Parasite. Book in hand and the internet as my further resource, I am now prepared to explain my reference with the hope that the concept may be further expanded in a meaningful way.

In the above we see a depiction of a children's parlor game, "hunt-the-slipper." Hunt-the-slipper serves as a relay for Serres for describing quasi-objects.

I found a great summary of "hunt-the-slipper" in the form of a nursery rhyme

ALL the players but one - are called cobblers,
and sit on the floor in a circle a few inches apart.
Then the customer comes and says:
"Cobbler, cobbler; mend my shoe.
Get it done by half-past two."
She hands one of the cobblers an old slipper, and turns away.

When she has counted up to ten she comes back,
but is told the slipper is not ready.
"I must have it," says the customer.
"Then you must find it," all the cobblers reply.

At that the search begins.
Each cobbler passes the slipper to their neighbour
hiding it from sight as much as possible;
but should the seeker spy it and call out the name
of the cobbler who has got it.
That cobbler must take her place, and brings it to be mended again.

The slipper must not stop in one place, but must keep passing round the circle, one way or the other.

The slipper functions here as the "quasi-object."  Serres writes,

"This quasi-object, when being passed, makes the collective, if it stops, it makes the individual. If he is discovered, he is 'it' [mort]. who is the subject, who is an 'I' or who am I? The moving furet weaves the 'we', the collective; if it stops, it marks the 'I'" (225).

The key point about this understanding of the quasi object is, for Serres, that the object "isn't played alone" (225). If not mistaken, this is what Scott was trying to get at when he said that we cannot just describe the object "as such" "in itself."  This is also, by the way, why Serres says we haven't "made" the quasi-object. "We" haven't made the quasi-object because the quasi-object makes us (even if, empirically, we made the object we call 'ball' in English). This will be explained better in a moment.

Serres argues that a ball "over there, on the ground" is nothing, stupid, no meaning, no function, and no values (225). The bodies that "play" it are "for" the ball and Serres argues that in the case of playing with balls (like basketball, for instance), "playing" amounts to "making oneself the attribute of the ball as substance" (226). While Andrew may disagree with this rather ontic and analogic way of thinking of play (restricting play to "game," as he put it to Kyle, rather than in Battaile's more radical sense), this image will help us in understanding how the quasi-object forms the "collective" for Serres and, as Serres' student, probably Latour.

How?

Today "we" as a class made a big deal out of who the "we" was. While Latour doesn't address this problem directly, Serres does:

"The "we" is not a sum of the "I's" but a novelty produced by legacies, concessions, withdrawls, resignations of the "I."  The "we" is less a set of "I's" than the est of the sets of its transmissions. It appears brutally in drunkenness and ecstasy, both annihilations of the principle of individuation. This ecstasy is easily produced by the quasi-object whose body is slave or object [. . .] The quasi-object is found to have this decentering. From then on, he who holds the quasi-object has the center and governs ecstasy. The speed of passing accelerates him and causes him to exist [. . .] Participation is the passing of the "I" by passing. It is the abandon of my individuality or my being in a quasi-object that is there only to be circulated it. It is rigorously the transubstantiation of being into relation. Being is abolished for the relation."

Ignoring for a second the Catholic rhetoric in the last sentence (we could critique the hell out of Serres and many other radical contemporary thinkers for the rhetoric they borrow from religion: Virilio immediately comes to mind), one pole of Serres discussion of the quasi-object explains how the 'I' is individuated from the 'we': by being "it," by stopping the circulation. This might fail as analogy, but lets think of language or words as quasi-objects. They circulate all over the place; indeed, the English language (and Language) in general binds human beings as a collective. But my composition I am working on right here right now is tending toward an "I," tending toward individuation even as I recognize the infinite iterability of every statement I make.

On the other hand, we have Serres explanation of how the collective is 'formed' (but NOT from already constituted individual "I's." Instead, the 'we' is formed by the speed of the circulation of the quasi-object such that it becomes a relation (a "social bond" as Latour puts it).

While I'm sure this post has at once complicated the idea of the quasi-object, I hope it also has helped in contextualizing Latour's use of Serres' concept. Serres' text has to be one of the most rich texts I have ever read because he draws such potent theoretical insights from something as simple as a French Fable (parasite as concept is drawn from a fable of La Fontaigne's).

What I like about Serres as opposed to Latour is even thought he refers to the discourses of science, it serves as an imaginative relay. Hayles has written an article explicitly critiquing Serres loose us of science, but I'm not sure this is always a flaw (although this is different from a former position I have held). Furthermore, whereas the tone of Latour is very confident in his project of "unveiling" (and yet not a kind of "unmasking" of a modern's 'false consciousness' of its condition; it is indeed interesting that he uses the very Heideggerian flavored 'unveiling' to discuss his method--but this is a side concern), Serres is less convinced that he has unveiled something and is self-reflexive in a, one might say, "postmodern" way. Before giving us the "Theory of the Quasi-Object," Serres reflects on the previous pages and asks the right questions:

"The problem with the preceding meditations is that they do not say distinctly enough whether they are a philosophy of being or of relation. Being or relating, that is the whole question. It is undoubtedly not an exclusive one. I still shall not decide whether the parasite is relational or real, whether it is an operator or a monad" (Serres 224).

Its Serres' commitment (paradoxically) to the space of indecision that sets him apart, I think, from Latour. Furthermore, it sets us apart from Serres, as we were trying to de-cide whether Haraway and/or Latour was engaged in an "epistemological" or "ontological" project: luckily we left this question open. This question (and distinction) will come back to haunt our discourse, however, when we get to Bryant and Harman, who argue that the mistake of "correlationism" comes down to adhering to Kantian epistemological model (at least epistemology is formed in the first two critiques -- thank you Scott for pointing this out). We mistake epistmological questions for ontological ones.

Being and relation, objects inside of objects, the circulation of quasi-objects: these lay out some of the key questions of object-oriented thought and, frankly, primary questions of philosophy.

Zum Beispiel (For Example): A Reflection on Michel Serres' The Parasite

I am currently working on two things in my summer “off.” One, is reading several texts that I will use for my independent study this summer. The other, is preparing for my language exam that I will take in the fall, and, should I not pass it, the spring as well. I only mention these personal ventures in order to give the conditions of possibility for the reflections that follow. While reading Michel Serres The Parasite, which may be one of my favorite books I have read in years, a footnote concerning ‘the example’ caught my eye. Serres writes, “I ask you, says Socrates to the Sophist, for some definitions; you give me praise and examples. Later on, Socrates says that he too sells them” (Serres 29). Plato’s relationship with examples as opposed to concepts is complex, as many critics more astute that I have pointed out. But to give a specific example (zum Beispiel), let us take the discussion of piety in the Euthyphro. Socrates criticizes his interlocutor’s use of examples when he is asking for a definition, an essence of piety:



Remember that I did not ask you to give me two or three examples of piety, but to explain the general idea which makes all pious things to be pious. Do you not recollect that there was one idea which made the impious impious, and the pious pious?

However, Socrates himself constantly resorts to examples and figures of speech in order to explain concepts. The “allegory of the cave,” for instance. The example seems to play a similar role to writing in Plato—it is a technique of the sophists! Thus, the example is a kind of approximation to truth, a simulacrum that stands in the place of truth, a metaphor, a figure, an image—not the thing itself. Derrida frames writing as a supplement, but we might frame writing and the example, in Serres’ terms, as a parasite.

The word “example” caught my eye because I had just (re)learned the phrase “zum Beispiel” in my German textbook. While the etymology I may perform here might be completely false in one sense, I believe that an investigation into the pieces off this word “Beispiel” is in order to figure out the composition of an “example.” We will break it up into two words: Bei and Spiel. I will look at three meanings of Bei.



1.) Bei as “in (the?) case of” (as in the understanding of the phrase zum Beispiel). Ex: “In case of fire”



2.) Bei as in “By Jove!” (a curse, a swear)



3.) Bei as in near



In the first sense, I have modified the definition a bit to connect this bei with the bei-spiel. The phrase “in case of” tends to preface a warning or a hypothetical statement. “In case of” indicates a particular context or situation—indeed, it indicates a ‘for example’—if this occurs, then this.

In the second sense, we have ‘bei’ as referring to the gods or God. Serres claims that the ‘noise’ at the door that interrupts is precisely the gods! “For the first time we know who knocks at the door, who makes a noise behind the door frame. The gods.Who warn us to move, for the sky is about to fall” (31). In the realm of the gods, Serres writes, “the given comes before the owed.” We say “By Jove!” or “By God!” when something unexpected comes to us—an interruption, a disturbance, a disaster. Our “bei” indicates our necessity to respond to the given of the gods (Heidegger’s es gibt?)

In the third sense, we can understand bei as near, relating to neighbor, but also to the para in parasite, which indicates a ‘to the side’ according to Serres. So the example is always on ‘this’ side of truth (wherever this side of truth may be), it is to be located near the site of truth, but not quite there. We approach truth—truth is a neighbor or, to put it in Serres terms, truth is the producer, and we have to pay (in Heidegger’s terms, ‘give thanks’) to the producer through our words. Serres writes, “the parasite pays in parables.” What is the parable, but a mode of example, an example that is not meant as an illustration, but as a complication and interruption of easy meaning. A parable is an ambiguous enthymeme, where interpretation is at once necessary and impossible. The parable is the parasite of truth and objectivity, it requires the participation of the subject, of the reader to make sense of it (and yet will never make sense of it).

And so we can now understand that in German the example is always a parable. How? By introducing the meaning of the second word “spiel”:



Spiel: “game, match, to play a game, (fig) “to be in the game,” “to be involved,” “(free)play,” (see spielraum—playspace, clearing)



If the example is related to being involved with the game, which is also to occupy a ‘playspace’ than we can understand how the example is always a parable, which is always a parasite. Play is always parasitical on someone else’s work. In order to play, in order to occupy one’s time in leisure, one usually is playing on someone else’s time (which is why employers always speak of “working on their time”). Play involves a surplus of time as do examples and parables. They not only require time to create and tell, but also time to interpret and to “play within.” Parables, parasites, are noise that looks like order—only when a reader or a node or whatever we want to call him/her involves oneself in the play of the parable does the noise become a message. Usually, this message actually looks closer to disorder than the ordered narrative of the parable. The parable seems self-contained and simple—beginning, middle, end—but like a poem, it contains layers of interpretations. People ‘pay in parables’ because parables are entertaining. Parables give us ‘work’ to do that seems like play.

Of course, the issue then comes when we consider that for most people an “example” tends to clarify an abstract concept rather than complicate it. But this is only if they take the example for the concept. Or, to put it differently, if they take the example as unmediated truth, as unrhetorical. Or, to place it within Derrida’s terms, if they take the example to without tracing its history and without realizing that the example reveals a relation rather than the thing or concept. If we do not lose sight of this relation, then our task becomes tracing the history of the trope. The example when looked at as a parable seduces us into play, it persuades us to give the parasite (the one telling the parable) food. The parable creates an enigma (as does the riddle), giving us a meaningful (and impossible task). They create mystery and enigma, tempting us to interpret while constantly eluding our ability to do so.

As Cary Wolf points out in his introduction to The Parasite in different language: “These questions bring us back, in the end, to Serres’ ‘method’, to his writing, perplexing and unwieldy here as perhaps nowhere else in his body of work. Perhaps to answer those questions, we just have to do the impossible anyway. Perhaps it is a question of what we think ‘thinking’ is, not a reflection or representation but a performance, a practice” (Wolf xxv). I think this is what I love most about Serres’ writing. He interprets and performs others’ texts in ways that I think pluralize meaning. I enjoy his writing like I enjoy good literature (I am planning on a post on Serres and Cormac McCarthy in the distant future). As Serres writes,



“These customs and manner can be the object of anthropological study; they were once the pleasures of idle reading, when literature still existed. Literature made clear, even for the blind, a kind of figural instructive anthropology that was both accessible and profound, but without theory, without awkward weight, not boring but intelligent. Why do we have to pay nowadays with lead for what we used to get from a quill pen?”



Is this “figural instructive anthropology” not another name for the parable?