Article,
“As Soon as We Are Two There is a Medium”
Media Theory, 5 (1): 185--200 (2021)
Abstract
Michel Serres did not identify with any discipline or method of analysis. He described his work as a general theory of relation. In this essay I show how Serres’ theory of relations questions the guiding ideological impulses of our age – desire for immediacy in the actualization of our plans, particularly in our control of nature, and noise-free transmission in our communication systems. Serres’ analyses of the mediating work of viruses, noises, and pollution takes us beyond the fields of human communication and language and challenges our most basic ontological ideas and philosophical oppositions such as subject and object, nature and culture, signal and noise.
