Niran Abbas

Department of Digital Media
Trinity and All Saints College, University of Leeds
niranabbas@hotmail.com

 

Review of: Maria Assad, Reading with Michel Serres: An Encounter with Time. SUNY Press, 1999.

 

Michel Serres is one of the few philosophers who can genuinely lay claim to the title of “specialist generalist” (Dale and Adamson). He began his adult life in the merchant navy, going on to study physics and mathematics. He wrote his first book on Leibnitz, followed by the Hermes series which is comprised of five volumes intersecting literature, science, and philosophy, and later, studies on Emile Zola, Jules Verne, Lucretius, the history of Rome, the origins of geometry, and the future of education. In all he has published more than twenty-five books in the last thirty years, about five of which have been translated into English. At present he is Professor in History of Science at the Sorbonne and Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Stanford University.

 

Michel Serres’s numerous books provide a multidisciplinary approach that brings together the study of literature, philosophy, ecology, poetry, and modern scientific thought. He has been envisioned by many as a voyager between the arts and the sciences, an “enigmatic ventriloquist, at once so close and so absent” (Delcò 229), a thinker, as theorist and critic Maria Assad states, who “invents” through translation, communication, and metaphor. Reading Serres can be a “reading challenge” (9). After all, Serres produces books made of other books that, he claims, have nothing to do with invention or creativity. In Serres’s vision, humans belong to the world in a simple, fundamental sense; ultimately, he insists, “nothing distinguishes me ontologically from a crystal, a plant, an animal” (Hermes 83). So how and why can we read him in this context? While these proclamations clearly serve a rhetorical function, they also bring to the surface a strong undercurrent of Serres’s thought: a desire to efface the edge of difference between language and representation, to fuse knowledge and being.

 

“In science,” Werner Heisenberg states, “the object of research is no longer nature in itself but rather nature exposed to man’s questioning, and to this extent man here also meets himself” (“Representation” 131). As Norbert Wiener explains in his book Cybernetics, this development devastated the positivistic tendencies of “that still quasi-Newtonian world of Gibbs” (92). It replaced that semi-classical view of time and order “by one in which time… can in no way be reduced to an assembly of deterministic threads of development.” Or in other words, “There is no set of observations conceivable which can give us enough information about the past of a system to give us complete information as to its future” (93). According to Serres, human history has been constructing–through religions, mythologies, traditions, and cultures, and above and beyond any individual biological death–what he calls a “collective immortality” in the historical sense of this expression. This construct functions on the basis of two interconnected activities in space and time: efficient operating techniques construct the world; sociocultural technologies construct time. This formula defines our episteme as a dynamical system for which the information of its state is given by the “operative techniques” (of pre-Cartesian and modern natural sciences); its evolution over time (its dynamic), on the other hand, is initiated and nurtured by “the sociocultural technologies” (the human sciences) (Assad 110-11). Assad’s book on time is devoted to what Serres would call a passage between science and literature. “New” knowledge lies in the inbetween, or the passage between fixed points of knowledge. In this challenging context, Reading with Michel Serres is a provocative look at Serres’s use of time in his encyclopaedic narrative using “dynamical” systems theory. The grouping of the chosen texts is intended, as the author states in her introduction, to provide “a global approach to Serres’s thought, so that a progressive development becomes visible, from chaotic multiple to circumstances, to dynamical statues, to a portrait of dynamical cultural systems that create time as an operating factor in their inventive drive” (Assad 5).

 

The central problem for contemporary philosophy is to relate to one another the varying conceptions of time that are developing in individual disciplines. The different approaches to this task are embedded in the following three basic tendencies that define the contemporary philosophy of time: “unification tendency,” “pluralization tendency,” and “tendency to relativize and historize time” (Sandbothe).

 

Reading with Serres: An Encounter with Time provides a blueprint of Serres’s work on time dynamics. Its six chapters comprise an assessment of Serres’s works arranged in an overlapping pattern. Time, Assad claims, is no longer thought of as a parameter adding something to a system from the outside, nor is time a purely historical force that Serres argues is the source of inherently violent foundations of our episteme. Formulating a kind of epistemological principle of uncertainty, Paul Ricoeur states that any meditation on time “‘suffers,’ quite simply, from not really being able to think time” (261). This failure is directly related to an intrinsic “hubris that impels our thinking [notre pensée] to posit itself as the master of meaning” (261). In Time and Narrative, Ricouer cautions against the hubris of reason but adds that an outright rejection of reason invites “obscurantism” leading to deceptive cognitive processes engaged in an intellectual free-for-all. “The mystery of time is equivalent to a prohibition directed against language. Rather it gives rise to the exigence to think more and to speak differently” (274). This statement reflects the issues at the center of Serres’s cycle of writings on time. Ricouer’s appeal for a new discourse capable of broaching time in its mysterious working also bears a striking resemblance to Mitchell Feigenbaum’s insistence that insights gained through recent dynamical systems theories “completely change the way to know something” (Assad 164). Both philosopher and mathematical physicist address the same issue–that is, that purely analytical methodology is no longer sufficient or even applicable. Possibilities for a new mode of thinking are forcing themselves upon the philosophical and scientific consciousness.

 

Serres’s writings, for which Assad’s study attempts to provide a dynamical reading practice, recuperate Ricouer’s dilemma and enlarge its scope. Serres’s overriding premise for the texts discussed is a kind of bracketing of analytical methods. By leaving the straight path of philosophical and scientific inquiry and opting instead for a “visiting” of circumstantial spaces, Serres reinstates a “method” that had been relegated long ago to the fictional, irrational, or emotive-intuitive spheres of perception. The convergence of different vocabularies of time is, from Richard Rorty’s perspective, by no means proof of an intrinsic coincidence between natural and historical time. The transfer of the vocabulary of historical time from the context of human self-description into the realms of the natural world, as well as the mathematically operational implementation of time, illustrate only the historical ability to adopt inner flexibility and contextual feedback even in a highly attuned vocabulary such as that found in physics and mathematics. In Rorty’s view, the different vocabularies that we use for differing purposes and in varying contexts are to be understood as neither convergent in an intrinsic sense, nor as essentially incommensurate in a phenomenological sense. Rather, they are themselves subject to change over time, through which they become related and disjoined in various ways according to the various historical situations that arise.

 

The radical temporalization of time that is expressed in these deliberations is noted in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.

 

The train of events is a train unrolling its rails ahead of itself. The river of time is a river sweeping its banks along with it. The traveller moves about on a solid floor between solid walls; but the floor and the walls are being moved along too, imperceptibly, and yet in very lively fashion, by the movements that his fellow-travellers make. (174)

 

Assad introduces the concept of unification tendency in the first two chapters by presenting accounts of historical time, the natural clock, and their effects upon “our epistemological conscious, in order to underscore by contrast the other ‘new’ time emerging from beneath the guise of tropes” (10). The protagonists of this unification tendency are convinced that time’s validity is that of being a new Archimedean Point that unifies our everyday experience of the self and the world with our academic theories about nature and man. This point of unification, they contend, has been emphasized time and time again in philosophy (by Bergson, Schelling, and Whitehead, among others), but has been ignored by science and technology.¹ It wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century that a global time concept was developed and mathematically implemented at the interface between the applied and pure sciences within the framework of “self-organization” or “autopoeitic” theories. According to the proponents of the unification tendency, this new conception of time enables the old duality between natural time and historical time to be overcome and resolves the conflict between physical, biological, and philosophical approaches to time that characterized the first half of the twentieth century.

 

Assad suggests that Serres’s understanding of the linear time of historical consciousness draws upon René Girard’s theory of the mimetic desire that lurks behind the scapegoat mechanism. For Girard, desire for a beloved object (or person) is always the imitation of another’s desire for the same object. The scapegoat as trope is considered both a malevolent and benevolent outsider. “Society is thus founded on an act of violence by exclusion, while history is the chain of repetitive imitations of this act” (Assad 11). Girard sees the formation of the sacred in the linear time of founding exclusions. Serres sees this same juxtaposition of violence and the sacred, but he locates the essence of evil as such at the core of repetitive gestures of exclusion. To overcome evil, Serres proposes an inventive effort: “to achieve this, the linearity of historical time has to be replaced by a new time” (11). The loss of repetition in Serres’s work (inherent in the nonlinearity of chaotic systems) becomes the weapon of inventive thought to combat stasis. Reading with Serres makes frequent reference to nonlinear dynamics, a theory presently at the forefront of emergent conceptualization of time.

 

The German theoretician of time, Herman Lübbe, observed,

 

that even the temporal structure of historicality, which according to Heidegger and the hermeneutic theory which followed him, results exclusively from the subject’s relationship to itself, which constitutes meaning, is in reality a structure belonging to all open and dynamic systems which is indifferent to the subject matter. (qtd. in Sandbothe 1)

 

Lübbe’s convergence theorem can be supported by the deliberations of Ilya Prigogine:

 

Whatever the future of these ideas, it seems to me that the dialogue between physics and natural philosophy can begin on a new basis. I don’t think that I can exaggerate by stating that the problem of time marks specifically the divorce between physics on one side, psychology and epistemology on the other…. We see that physics is starting to overcome these barriers. (qtd. in Sandbothe 1)

 

In Assad’s chapter “Time Promised: Reading Genèse” (Genèse is Serre’s meditation on noise), she investigates the transition or mutation of “noise” and the “multiple.” Serres provides a framework for understanding how ordered complexity, information, even meaning, can arise from interaction with disorder. By noise is meant not loud or obnoxious sounds but that which gets mixed up with messages as they are sent. Noise causes loss of information in transmitted messages, but in systems in which message transmission is but a component function, the variety introduced by noise can come to be informative and meaningful in another, emergent context. The “multiple” is a “new object for philosophy” that Serres is “offering to be sounded and perhaps fathomed” by his readers (Serres, Genesis 2); it is an aggregate or “a set undefined by elements or boundaries. Locally, it is not individuated; globally, it is not summed up” (4). These concepts become in Genesis the first metaphoric paradigm in a chain of tropes that Serres continues to weave into a series of epistemological writings providing the model for a new concept of time.

 

Assad claims that the shift from the French “bruit” to noise (from a clearly modern word to a term more or less effaced by historical time) is symptomatic of a development in Serres’s materialist notion of time. Bruit becomes part of “noise,” which the author revives from the old French where it meant disorderly furor as well as noise. Built into the very concept of noise–as a set of interference phenomena and as the parasite that triples as an abusive guest/a parasitic organism/static noise–is the overriding notion of the excluded middle or third (Assad 18). Genèse, according to Assad, is an attempt to give prime billing to the exclusion, but without its conceptual dominance or accrued power: “Disorder, chaos, and the clamor of human relations have to be discovered, uncovered and accepted as valid fields of contemplation without squeezing them into a straight jacket” (18). The “multiple” is the metaphorical vehicle Serres chooses to guide his reader through chaos, that is, to have her confront the complexity of the most common elements of his world. The metaphoric nature of this iterative process prevents it from becoming a linear progression and assures an open-ended variability.

 

Assad makes two observations concerning Serres’s vision of time. First, both the static and the “dynamical” are expressed by “stability,” the latter by a “new stability.” Second, the statue as the paradigm of the stagnant static that Serres consistently aligns with death as its telos is contrasted to a turbulent state that is “a median state between a slightly redundant order and pure chaos” (Assad 120). The enigma of time is thus not really resolved. History as a destructive time is described by “noise” deformed into rumor and dull repetition. On the other hand, “noise” of la belle noiseuse promises dissipative possibilities. For Serres, la belle noiseuse is the passage from the pre-phenomenological primal soup to our phenomenological ordered world. She is the processing of all possibilities, not their sum or reservoir. Since she is neither chaos nor order, she is what dynamicists call a “phase transition,” that fuzzy state when a system is at the threshold of a phase change (Paulson 404-416). In Genèse, the static as stagnant redundancy and the dynamical aspect of turbulence are hesitatingly wedded in a statue that turbulently rises and fades from the reader’s grasp: a fluctuation, an oscillating state between the pre-phenomenological and the phenomenon. Phenomenological time, consisting in a dimension of future, past, and present, is explained by Ricoeur as being appropriate only in narrative. And time in the narrative “refiguration” itself becomes comprehensible only up to a point. For Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas’s and Michael Theunissen’s time marks the “mystery” in our thought that denies representation in that our existence irrevocably pervades our thinking.

 

Assad’s chapters “Time Immortal” and “Time Empirical” address Serres’s Détachment and Les cinq sens, a series of fables and an exploration of the five senses. Serres’s philosophy of circumstance shifts from paradigms of fluid mechanics and passages to parasitism and tropes of topological landscapes. Assad provides close readings of the horizontal (transcendent) and vertical (static) planes from Chinese farmers and kite flying to the myth of Orpheus. Time in Les cinq sens is understood as infinitesimal “differentials” that together cannot be totalled up; they are non-integrable. Always inchoate, they are local events we grasp or “suppose” through our senses. Time for Serres percolates rather than flows; it is unpredictable, unmeasurable, and unintegrable.

 

Far from flowing in laminar and continuous lines, like a well-behaved river under a bridge, upstream to downstream, time descends, turns back on itself, stops, starts, bifurcates ten times, divides and blends, caught up in whirlpools and counter-currents, hesitant, aleatory, uncertain and fluctuating, multiplied into a thousand beds like the Yukon river. Sometimes time passes, sometimes not; but when it passes, it does so as if through a colander… and this filter or percolator supplies the best model for the flow of time. (Serres, “Turner” 15)

 

According to Serres, “time can be schematised by a crumpling, a multiple, foldable diversity” (Conversations 59). Out of this foldability emerges, then, a related phenomenon: topological time materializes itself in a spatially foldable “nearness.” Serres demonstrates his point through the example of a sketch on a handkerchief:

 

If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it certain fixed distances and proximities. If you sketch a circle in one area, you can mark out nearby points and measure far-off distances. Then take the same handkerchief and crumple it, by putting it in your pocket. Two distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed. If, further, you tear it in certain places, two points that were close can become very distant. This science of nearness and rifts is called topology, while the science of stable and well-defined distances is called metrical geometry…. It is simply the difference between the topology (the handkerchief) is folded, crumpled, shredded) and geometry (the same fabric is ironed out flat)…. As we experience time–as much in our inner sense as externally in nature, as much as le temps of history as le temps of weather–it resembles this crumpled version much more than the flat, overly simplified one. (60)

 

As a percolating sheet wrapping all circumstances, topological time is thus spatially foldable, hence enfolding a temporal nearness. In Serres’s “timing of space, time sheds its last distinctions, past, present, and future become one” (Assad 9). For Serres, in this sense, the past is, and has never been, out-of-date.²

 

“Time Dynamical” and “Time Inventive” make use of simulations of nonlinear dynamical models. Statues and Le Tiers-Instruit teem with dense metaphorical strings of apologues that make, at times, for difficult reading. In Statues, Serres makes a mental leap that allows him to examine the statue functioning not as static entity but as a dynamical system.

 

The statue of Molière’s Commander in the last chapter of Hermès I: La communication is the first figure with which Serres models the full authority of the stable and immutable Law, and against which he pits Dom Juan’s shifty logic and maneuvering. The Commander’s shadow looms large in Serres’s texts on communication where any argument, pointing to stagnation, rigidity, stability, repetition, thesis, unitary, or binary constructs, is ultimately expressed in analogies involving statues or statue-like phenomena. The statue as the incarnation of absolute immobility, or as rigid perfection no longer in need of inventive improvements, haunts the writings of the philosopher of communication. It is the spectre of death, the totality of stability and of absence of variability. It is Serres’s model of evil. At the heart of the most static and stagnant of all his discursive tropes, Serres discovers a complexity and an inventive power where the absence of repetitive instants invites continuous new findings. (Assad 168-9)

 

The many functions of the statue are presented in the narrative via a series of descriptive portraits of historical/cultural phenomena that trace out dynamical behavior. Assad invites the reader to consider the paradoxical point where Serres’s quest for a true understanding of time, though seemingly farthest away from scientific discourse, parallels the most recent scientific and mathematical findings concerning nonlinear dynamical systems.

 

Serres’s Le Tiers-Instruit is the blueprint of a dissipative dynamical system couched in a theatrical setting of a Harlequin-prologue. The Harlequin is Serres’s epistemological model for a strange attractor. On a computer screen the strange attractor can be traced out as a basin toward which the trajectory of a dynamical system’s orbit converges while looping erogodically through its phase-space. In the text, this looping is discursively portrayed by the harlequinesque métis, a chaotic body or half-breed who goes on halving himself like a Cantor set or a Koch curve (“middle third”), which links to Serres’s neologism of the “middle-instructed.”³ The third element with Serres is neither “this nor that”; it is both and neither. According to Serres, “the real passage occurs in the middle” (Troubadour 5). Whether Serres talks about the left-handed child (himself) taught to write like a right-handed child, or the swimmer who arrives at the middle of a stream where he enters a space that is neutral in distance to both shorelines, all are harlequinseque in their dilemma; they arrive at a point where commonly accepted definitions fail, where all directions and meanings are equally valid (Troubadour 7). To learn to live or pass in this “middle-ground” is what Serres calls an “apprenticeship for the making of the third.”

 

Assad’s final chapter, “Time and Earth,” deals with The Natural Contract, revealing a relationship between time as a “natural” phenomenon and the question of right as an expression of the human contractual conscious. Serres’s notion of the natural contract grows out of his work on Lucretius and Epicurean philosophy, which opens a passage between social contract and natural contract. The appeal of the Lucretian model for Serres clearly stems from its positing an essential freedom at its base. Assad’s project is to present dynamical time in the most applicable and concrete form we are capable of understanding today, namely the social contract, sealing a union between the human subject and the physical object. It puts into a proposal with practical applications for the future what Serres has gleaned from an ancient fabled setting called “Ulysses’ circum-navigations,” a nonlinear dynamical system that invents new knowledge at every turn, without closure. We call it “epic” and ignore the fact that what we so designate is the story of a new time (Serres, Les cinq 290). In The Natural Contract, Serres searches out a “strong and simple science [that] will tell me the moment of denouement, of being stripped bare and untied, the moment of true casting off… from this earth toward the void” (Natural 115).

 

The inner reflexivity in the modern apprehension of time is reminiscent of Kant and Heidegger. Bruno Latour, Serres’s conversation partner in Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (1995), presses him on the issue of the use of time in his writings. Latour sees in the twisting of time one of the reasons for the intellectual jarring experienced by readers who judge Serres’s writings to be obscure and difficult to follow: “This problem of time is the greatest source of incomprehension, in my opinion” (Serres, Conversations 48). But Serres points out that in his writings the question is not one of playing modernity against a past that has been used and is done with. In other words, his juxtaposing of text, authors, and myths into one time frame is not a juxtaposing of “times” expressed as past, present, and future, all lumped together. “I want to be able to understand time and, in particular, a self-same time” (46). To illustrate the nature of his contemporaneity that seems to situate him outside of time, Serres points once again to Lucretius who,

 

in his own time, really was already thinking in terms of flux, turbulence, and chaos, and, second, that through this, he is part of our era, which is rethinking similar problems. I must change time frames and no longer use the one that history uses. (47)

 

Reading with Serres provides a metaphoric chain forming feedback mechanisms by which an insight once attained becomes a metaphoric input for the next, comprising a network of relations producing an interdisciplinary interface. Time is the symptom of symptoms:

 

What’s time exactly? One form of time for instance, is a clock time which is reversible. But I am also in danger of dying because of aging. This is a second form of time; the time of weakness, the time of old age, the time of death. This is exactly what constitutes thermodynamic time, the time of entropy. But this time is irreversible because I am going to death and not to rebirth. But then I have granddaughters and they are beautiful, they are far more beautiful then me! This is also irreversible but it is the time of Darwin. That is, although I am going down to death, the time of Darwin is coming up to evolution. So you have three times, all very different: reversible, irreversible minus and irreversible plus. And what is time? It is the combination of these three. My metaphorical style is a combination of three results of scientific thought. And what is this combination? I don’t know exactly, it is not scientific thought, it is metaphysical. Also with chaos theory a new theory of time comes about: time is indeterministic to the future. So I must think about time with the instructions of astrononomy, mechanics, thermodynamics biology, chaos theory and so on. I must study these specialities in order to have a metaphysics of time. There is not an opposition between scientific thought and the metaphysical world. (Dale & Adamson)

 

Michel Serres shows that culture circulates through science no less than science circulates through culture. The heart that keeps this circulatory system flowing is narrative–narratives about culture, narratives within culture, narratives about science, narratives within science (Hayles 21). Reading with Michel Serres/An Encounter with Time is a provocative study of Michel Serres’s work for both Serreseans and those new to his work. At a time where the threat of disciplinary meltdown seems increasingly to produce a retreat to narrow specialization, it is rare to encounter work that genuinely dares to think globally, with all the problems that entails. As Steven Brown states, “Serres’ work dares.”

 

Notes

 

1. In an interview with Catherine Dale and Gregory Adamson, Serres discusses the importance of Whitehead and Bergson in his work on time and metaphysics. See <http://www.thepander.co.nz/culture/mserres6.php>

 

2. See Ming-Qian Ma’s “The Past Is No Longer Out-of-Date” (4). The author mentions in “Notes” that the quote in the title is taken from Serres’s and Latour’s Conversations (48).

 

3. The Koch Curve is an example of a fractal created by a replacement rule. Such fractals begin with a simple image. In the case of the Koch curve and its variants, this image is a straight line. This image is then changed to something else, based on the replacement rule. The new image contains elements that correspond to elements in the original image. The replacement rule is then applied to these portions of the image, creating a more detailed picture. This process continues indefinitely, creating infinite detail from a simple picture and a replacement rule. The Cantor set works a similar way. Consider a line segment of unit length. Remove its middle third. Now remove the middle thirds from the remaining two segments. Now remove the middle thirds from the remaining four segments and so on. What remains after infinitely many steps is a remarkable subset of the real numbers called the Cantor set, or “Cantor’s Dust.”

Works Cited

 

• Brown, Steven D. “Michel Serres: Myth, Mediation and the Logic of the Parasite” (14 May 2000) <http://devpsy.lboro.ac.uk/psygroup/sb/Serres.htm>.
• Dale, Catherine, and Gregory Adamson. “A Michel Serres Interview (Part II).” Pander OS 2.0 <http://www.thepander.co.nz/culture/mserres6.php>.
• Delcò, Alessandro. “Michel Serres: Philosophy as an Indeterminate Essence to be Invented.” Trans. Matthew Tiews and Trina Marmarelli. Configurations 8.2 (2000): 229-234.
• Girard, René. Violence and the Scared. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1977.
• Hayles, Katherine N. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.
• Heisenberg, Werner. “The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics.” Trans. O. T. Benfey. The Discontinuous Universe. Ed. S. Sears and G. W. Lord. New York: Basic Books, 1972. 122-135.
• Ma, Ming-Qian .”The Past Is No Longer Out-of-Date: Topological Time and Its Foldable Nearness in Michel Serres’s Philosophy.” Configurations 8.2 (2000): 235-244.
• Musil, Robert. The Man Without Qualities. Trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. Vol. 2. London: Picador, 1979.
• Paulson, William. “On a Dynamic Analysis Of The Textual Variation of Le ‘Chef-Oeuvre Iconnu’ by Balzac, Honore de.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 19.3 (1991): 404-416.
• Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Vol III. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
• Sandbothe, Mike. “The Temporalization of Time in Modern Philosophy.” <http://www.uni-jena.de/ms/ms_time.html>.
• Serres, Michel. Hermèes I: La communication. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969.
• —. Hermes–Literature, Science and Philosophy. Ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.
• —. Les cinq sens. Paris: Grasset, 1985.
• —. The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.
• —. Troubadour of Knowledge. Trans. Sheila Faria Gloser and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997.
• —. “The Case of Turner.” SubStance #83, 26.2 (1997): 6-21.
• —. Genesis. Trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.
• —. Serres, Michel, with Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Trans. Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.
• Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961.