Whether we speak of identities or relationships, our selective vision is inevitably exclusionary. Speaking meaningfully to one another entails ignoring all that pervades a setting; the extraneous; noise. Yet such a willful dismissal does not render the excluded unimportant. As Latour writes: Things strike back. While relation may produce being, there will always be another/others who benefit from, or feed off of, action and intention.Michel Serres' The Parasite explores the world of the ignored; the third in a two-way interaction. When the banquet is over and the guests have departed, it is the mouse who will feast on the surfeit. The unexpected guest; the beneficiary of lost excess. Surplus creates an unexploited niche, ready to be filled. Serres writes that the introduction of the parasite is analogous to the introduction of noise: it frustrates mechanistic and deterministic relationships; it yields unexpected outcomes.
Such unexpected outcomes can be seen as creative novelty - the knife-edge of history. With only a priori delineated relationships uncertainty remains absent entirely. Inspiration, revelation, epiphany, all initially strike us as unwanted noise until categorized or related to other phenomena or concepts. Lacking the unexpected and, sometimes, inconvenient, we may never view things afresh. The parasite, the unwanted, forces a reexamination of accepted understandings; "it is the location and the subject of transformation." Awakening new possibility, the parasite, when viewed narrowly, may be seen as an encumbrance - an unwanted effluent.
But only the unexpected is truly novel. Any time the whole is transcendent it will force a redefinition (an expansion?) of the system. The whole is always a negotiation of internal mechanisms, each at various times subsuming and being subsumed by the others. No thing can obstinately cling to its past identity if it is to move forward. While the parasite draws upon energy and time, it also demands change in unexpected ways. It is here that novelty emerges, and the world is constantly remade afresh.
