Who we are, and how we understand the world, is intimately bound up in our experiences of it. While life moves forward, in the creative novelty of the moment, we try to make sense of such radical difference. To do so we create theories and labels, give names to things, impose rigid identities on all aspects of phenomena (at least the ones we accept in the first place). Our main form of communicating the world to one another, to make sense of changes over time, to reconcile differences into knowable, understandable, apt for analysis, entities, is through our language. This language, must, by-necessity, rely upon our created labels as the avenue of communication. Michel Serres has a problem with this, and thinks that, as we have become overcome with language, we are ignoring crucial aspects, not just of reality, but of ourselves.
For Serres, our world has become overrun with language. By prizing this type of knowing and communicating, at the expense of others, he believes that we have lost touch with so much human-ness. The Five Senses: a philosophy of mingled bodies (I) seeks to alert the reader to all the different ways we know through our body's unique and evolving interactions with the world around us. Serres posits that there is much of the world that we have forgotten to touch, taste, smell and feel, and, thus, our understanding of it is more limited than need be. Our reliance upon language means a focus on that which is knowable in the most conventional (read: western) sense. This relies upon a fixed definition of identity, and upon a parsing of the minutiae of experience. Science excels at such a parsing; this is not meant as a denigration. What is problematic is when we begin to assume one right way of knowing, thus remaining willfully ignorant of so much else. No matter how fine-tooth our comb, the world remains a tangled and uncertain place. Simplifying it yields a certain type of truth only.
Rather than being made up of discrete and easily isolated entities, the world is, Serres writes, a tangled multiplicity. And we are a part of it. Just as a system must be investigated to speak meaningfully of the interactions therein, we are both the result of our placement, and our actions and interactions within, and as a part of, the world around us. Understanding what that means - knowing how to paint a more fulsome picture of ourselves - requires that we do not simply approach the world through the medium of language. We constantly transcend ourselves and our definitions, so too does the world. Life at the edge of creative novelty requires that we employ all of our faculties to know. We have forgotten many of them, and, in the process, made ourselves and our world more static; more dominated by stagnant identity. The result, is death.
