From Actor-Network to Parasite-Object : A Non-Strategic Interpretation of Michel Serres

• Main Authors: Chen, Rong-Tai, 陳榮泰
• Other Authors: Fu, Daiwie
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/89922940884821121312

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 歷史研究所 === 98 === As a French philosopher and historian of sciences, Michel Serres is known for his writings which marvelously bridge diverse topics ordinarily considered distant or even irrelevant. Since 1960s, his philosophical meditation upon communication and mediation had provided a new way of thinking about the sciences and their problems nowadays. For him today the sciences are more about message-transmitting than about commodity-producing, more of relation than of being. Following this line of thinking, Serres also deeply influenced some science and technology students such as Michel Callon and Bruno Latour as well as the now influential “actor-network theory”. What I am trying to do in this paper is to trace some of his main themes about the relation between science and society. In the era of information, what is the role of science in the course of assembling the collective, and conversely, how can we do sciences collectively? This is a standard question of actor-network theory (ANT). By using ANT as a reference point for comparison, I’d like to point out that whilst ANT is sometimes seen as a mere tool for describing scientific practices and thus may be (unfairly) accused of being amoral, Serres indeed takes the moral dimension seriously. By inventing the character of the parasite (which in some sense is an equivalent of the actor in ANT) and high-lighting the paradoxical situation of messenger, Serres asks how parasites or actors with successful strategies may make their collective malfunction and do something mal (evil). There is an eminent difference between successful militant actions and successful communications. This problem leads Serres to conceive a philosophy of object. For him object is not only outside but the precondition of the collective. It transcends the collective and is what its “social contract” refers to. No society can do without some object. Science once played the role of referring to this objectivity but the ever-expanding collective had made it worn-out: everything seems inside now. Whereas we inhabitants of the Earth now face the malfunction of our old collective and the crisis of the old objectivity, Serres suggests we conceive a global object and make a contractual rather than strategic relation with it.