To Michel Serres and to all
of those who are crossing
his Northwest Passage

– Inscription from Latour’s Pasteurization of France

*

What is Serres’ Northwest Passage? From Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres with Bruno Latour:

This is why I have compared them to the Northwest Passage … with shores, islands, and fractal ice floes. Between the hard sciences and the so-called human sciences the passage resembles a jagged shore, sprinkled with ice, and variable … It’s more fractal than simple. Less a juncture under control than an adventure to be had.

*

The dualism of material and mind which has been productive for centuries has led the Western world into paralysis. We can’t resolve it by simply denying the fact of the duality, because even if we negate the What of the thought, the How of the thought survives it in our way of doing our thinking. We have to find new mind-movements — dances — that permit new lifeworlds (or networks of lifeworlds) to arise.

But we cannot understand these new movements by our old movements. We have to stop for a moment, then start in a different direction, with different movements. Groping, stumbling, stammering, in a shifty, shadowy terrain, guided by our fingertips and the star of perplexity. That’s how it’s done.