Sunday, June 9, 2013

The Troubadour of Knowledge - Michel Serres

A topology of time and of the person. Michel Serres speaks of the Instructed-Third. Fabulous generalist? Not precisely. More as one who is, themself, a fluid ensemble, what the ancients might have called a master of rhetoric. Odysseus, man of a thousand talents. Lumpy time demands lumpy personhood.

As time is not simply a linear recounting, but emerges in fits and starts, so too, the creative novelty of the individual, or better, the hub of the wheel, is a passage, held in place by a great many things. Here again events converge, and novelties emerge. Wobbly persona; uncertain personhood. Time is a continual birth of us all, and us, of time. If someone asks who you really are, look deeply into the eyes of he who asks, he will not ask again.

There is no end to the patchwork cloak of us all. Harlequin forever removes his second-to-last coat. The task of each is to make that cloak as variegated , as multiple, as possible. In other places Serres speaks of dancers; of the passage of muse. We cannot help but translate the world, but neither can we dominate it. We are swallowed by a context that we co-evolve with and within. Whitehead called it superject. The goal is thought, leading to invention. Novelty: the birth place of time.