Throughout his work Serres insights buck the misplaced assumptions

that the hard sciences, which he importantly does not conflate with a strictly
medical model of the body, treat the body in a manner that is brutish and
uninspired. These assumptions are nested in a concern that conceiving the
body as a functional machine somehow strips away our humanity, leaving us
soulless automata with no freedom for choice or agency. The fact that
advances in bioengineering and artificial intelligence now make it very
difficult to think of machines as mere, unthinking machines aside, Serres is
concerned precisely with exploring the ways in which the machine-like
qualities of the body/mind confer upon it an enormous capacity for the
qualities that we are typically afraid a man/machine analogy would neglect
to exalt: creativity, flexibility, and freedom. We are invited on a sensate
journey to develop the pointed difference between the mechanistic of the
limiting man/machine analogy and the machinic. The latter relays an
ecological network of bodies, human bodies included, that organize
themselves through what we may call, rather anthropomorphically, mentorlike encountersmentoring encounters in the sense that an
experimental/organizational knowledge surges to the fore as a processual
necessity.
In developing an understanding of the body for Serres, starting from
the mind is neither a slight of hand nor a philosophical quagmire, but rather
an important nod to the thread of Spinozist double-aspectism that makes his
work decipherable in a framework of immanence. Here, the mind is the
virtual form of the body, or of its faculty or possibility for doing that which
has not yet been done. We may cite as rudimentary evidence of this notion
mathematical concepts designed, among other purposes, to posit clear
ground: the tautology of identity in logic, the empty subset in set theory, the
number zero, and the algebraic variable x. All of these foundational ideas
in the structuring of knowledge of the world can be understood as having

been the setting out of the minds initial grasping of the body in its indefinite
capacity to transform.
It is the social sciences lack of this foundational notion of malleability
that makes Serres posit that the hard sciences approach the body more
closely than the openly subjective sciences, and leads me to believe that it is
also what creates the fear that the body/machine analogy threatens rather
than bolsters notions of human creativity and freedom. This, of course in
addition to the Cartesian automatic body that has come to be associated
with a science of the human body that indeed does undermine the capacities
of the body in service of its own desire to speak with the authoritative air of a
certainty that produces expertise and insurance funding.
The mind is not simply the body in the form of ideas, but also the
ideas of the bodys transformational capacity which it incites through an
imaginational sensing of these combinatory or eliminatory possibilities. In
Serres work it is abundantly clear that movement is the propeller of this
imaginational sensing and, frankly, the stuff of life. This perspective parallels
well-developed research on neonatal perception in developmental
psychology. We know that the peripheral vision of newborns, otherwise
unable to see, is already able to detect motion and that, when observing a
lack thereof from a caregiver, confusion and upset follow shortly. In
Troubadours of Knowledge, Serres cites gymnasts, athletes, and even the
busy digits of writers as exemplary of moments in which we exist as the
necessity of movement, when we occupy or, more accurately, have an
experience of what he calls a third space. This third space is where the
function of detecting undifferentiated motion at the periphery is invoked
again, this time meeting with the drive of directed activity; Virtual capacity
for the imaginative extension of the body in space and its immediate
displacement onto an altogether different plane of intensive spatiotemporal
necessity.

I quote at length from a passage on a tennis match in Troubadours of

Knowledge: This is the state of vibrating sensitivitywakeful, alert, watchful
a call to the animal who passes close by, lying in wait, spying, a solicitation
in every sense, from every direction for the whole admirable network of
neurons. Run to the net, ready to volley: once again a future participle, the
racket aims for all shots at once, as if the body, unbalanced from all sides,
were knotting a ball of time, a sphere of directions, and were releasing a
starfish from its thorax.
The third space, something of an affective loci of extending oneself as
to parallel or become submerged in the components of the surrounding
milieu. A felt signature of the collision between the farther bounds of virtual
stock, as it were, and the necessity of actualization in a factitious instant.
Serres is quick and rather candid to note that this was formerly considered a
soul, this embodied kernel of proto-individuation.
In that this collision of virtual and actual spheres at the forefront here,
life and the body emerge as a perpetual disequilibrium or a flux of breath
that exacerbates the contours of the organism in distinction from its
environment. This distinction infuses life with the impetus to scramble for
some form of shelter, however temporary, conferring on movement a
splintering of new velocities and trajectories. From this same line of
reasoning, old age is construed as body to body equilibrium between the
universe and the organism, as in the completion of a musical chord. It is the
loss of friction, the still, given-ness of the world signals that the body will
near the end of its duration.
To begin to conceive the processes of potentiality of the body in which
virtual possibilities become actualized, is to recognize a form of surplus of
the body in the form of a dynamic and theoretically infinite gestural
repertoire. We can see this simply when we stretchwe count on a certain
overflow of extension. Perhaps this is why Serres repeatedly refers back to

the courage or the valor of mimicry; the integration of the body and the
world that exceeds its borders appears to proceed through a sort of limit play
or continuous breaching of thresholds of integrating movement that is not
binary (recorded movement, or not previously used) but has fine gradients
whose effects are not solely that of shaping the body in one way or another.
The effects of the infinite shades of gestural integration also refer to the
extent to which this information is able to incite variations of itself and draw
up nuanced combinations of movement that also proliferate and form new
coordinated alliances. Put simply, the more the body does, the more it
becomes flexible and programmable, increasingly transformable from forces
which hum in and around it.
Through the unceasing experimentation requisite for increased
flexibility, the body becomes more vulnerable, more at sea, and likewise
expresses more intensive moments of desperation to make a temporary
shelter for itself. In keeping with the Worlds and Words theme, we can run
with one possible example of temporary shelter, an enunciation. With words
and writing, we see clearly the value of vulnerability or swimming in Serres
third space. He draws up the figurations of the stylist, on the one hand,
and the grammarian on the other to demonstrate the vibration that occurs in
the phase space of writing as it configures thought. The two are engaged in
what I envision as an out-and-out academic catfight. The grammarian
accuses the stylist of bloated musings that abandon precision and clarity.
When the tables are turned, as you can imagine it is the stylist berating the
grammarian for killing the nuanced texture of language in the name of
whose vibrancy and expressivity she has exposed herself in order to secure.
[The Grammarian: you know nothing! The Stylist: you do nothing!]
Of course, each one persists in its own form of obscurity, one through
comprehension, accuracy, and detail and the other through breadth and a
setting-in-motion. We are reminded that we must pay in the currency we
want to earn, that clarity is returned in narrowness and lofty views by

imprecision. Serres claims that even in philosophy, no one has ever

succeeded in having his cake and eating it too. As a graduate student who
runs in and out of philosophy, I will of course challenge this with a thousand
page dissertation. But truly, I think that this idea holds wait in the experience
that these broad, dichotomous frames do seem to move unflinchingly
forward. Narrowness and loftiness indeed tend to draw themselves out
irrespective of our best attempts to control or redirect languages for which
we ourselves appear to have become siphons. Again, we are reminded to
persist in greeting the cyclical travel between poles of universality and
singularity.
Lets now return to mimicry, a process that might be considered lazy
and herd-like to a culture that oversees self-styling individuality through
creative consumer choices. Interestingly, mimicry is here deemed bold and
brave exactly because of the absence of choice that it pushes us to fathom.
When we mimic or learn a new sequence of gestures, we are submitting
ourselves to a sweeping recombination of procedural and symbolic
information whose configurations and newly constituted virtual charges (that
attract, repel, cut off, re-align, etc.) mold and shape our bodies as to
actualize new signatures and styles that sediment in ways that are
impossible to predict in advance.
When mimicry or imitation is conceived as the foundation of
knowledge, the philosophical debate between rationalism and empiricism,
innate ideas versus the tabula rasa, is obsolete. The residue of time and
enduring corpus of dynamic postural, gestural, and informational flows are
invisible to us. However, Serres goes on to posit novel body-generated
thought as a lesser-known antidote to aging and the sadness and repetition
that measure imbecility. At first blush it seemed curious that repetition is so
denigrated given the status of mimicry. There is a tension in these ideas that
challenge the reader to see beyond the dimensions of a hypermodern form
of individuality that would conceive mimicry as copycatting and novelty as

unequivocally virtuous. We are directed again to the stylist and the

grammarian. Of course, their arguments each serve valid points about the
use of language, but neither seem to notice that the movement between
their positions, the toggling back and forth between perceptual expansion
and contraction, is an embodied knowledge, for Serres presumably founded
in mimicry.
Mimicry, then, functions rather similarly to how changing ones clothes
might have been conceptualized in the Baroque. One may find oneself a new
person once they have donned new clothes, but this change in identity
based on assuming a new, considerably surface-level form always still marks
the setting of an encounter in which the mimicked formation activates an
entire index of virtual registers within which it is machinically integrated in
any myriad form of enunciation or expression. A change in identity based on
posturing may excite and perturb the singularization of the third space, but
the two are not collapsible in the least.
This mimicry is not only the mimicking of other human or organic
forms. The body also produces technology as objectifications and scatterings
of itself. It lightens itself in a sort of casting off. We then have to learn how to
use these technologies, a process in which Serres sees us tracing the
evolution of invention itself and the re-inscription of our tools on and through
the body. For instance, even an act like driving a car connects one remotely
to a moment of history in which the rotary motion of running was cast off as
the wheel.
In considering the sense in which the body may suggest an image of
itself as machine-like, Serres draws an analogy of the recording processes of
the body and the recording programs with which computers come equipped.
Both for the human body and for the computer, programs are recorded that
pass from the exterior of the machine into its memory. The human body
records a massive quantity of gestural sequences as integrated corporal

schema, and in this way, gesture bears the same relationship to anatomical
assemblies and biochemical functions as software does to hardware. Once
recording begins, however, it is not realistically possible to distinguish the
difference, in computers, between programs and data, and in humans,
between imitation and personal habits. In both cases, what we see is the
emergent capacity to create programs that modify themselves or produce
others.
We can conclude, then, that the bodys machinism here is a far cry
from a mechanistic rendering of the body. Simply put, the body reflects a
machine-like quality to the degree that the organic world does. Not as
metaphor or analogy, but in the sense mentionedthat the technology we
create, as our creative prostheses, reveal processes of the ecological body
whose consistent ontological distinctness is produced through the constant
renegotiation of boundaries and thresholds of consistency. It is very much a
matter of selection and mixture.