62 theory
producing.^47 As Serres elaborates both in the 2001 book titledHominescence
and in its 2003 follow-upL’Incandescent,^48 we now inhabit humanly constructed
and global systems whose cognitive and agentive capacities not only exceed us
but also transform us—and in such a way that the self-creation we realize by
means of those systems transpires always in conjunction with an insurmount-
able ignorance or unknowing concerning both producer and produced.
Much in line with Taylor and Hayles, Serres argues that such ignorance
proves operative in technoscientific networks that alter not only human rela-
tions to time and space, as occurs through the various media associated with
digital technologies, satellite networks, mobile communications, cyberspace,
cybernetics, and so on, but also to death and life, as occurs through techno-
scientific achievements like the thermonuclear bomb and bioengineering,
wherein we assume concretely a responsibility for life and death that is dis-
tinctly new because of its global scale, one that eludes and defies our grasp
both conceptually and practically. In light of such achievements, we would need
to see ourselves no longer as passive recipients or even as vigilant observers
of a nature “out there” but rather as nature’s “active architects and workers.”^49
Taking “nature” as a verb, one could say not only that we “are natured,” as
given over to the given, but also that we “nature,” by actively interfacing with
the given so as to shape and transform it—only then to be, in turn, reshaped
once more by our own creation, and so on: “we are causing to be born, in the
etymological sense of the term, an entirely new nature, in part produced by us
and reacting upon us.”^50 Assuming, then, a kind of “omni-responsibility”^51 or
even “omnipotence”^52 known formerly only by God, we are becoming in con-
crete ways “our own cause, the continuous creator of our world and of our-
selves,”^53 but we do so in such a way that “through new and unexpected loops,
we ourselves end up depending on the things that depend globally on us.”^54
Such looping between that which we create and that which, in turn, re-
creates us takes place notably by means of what Serres calls “world-objects”
(objets-monde), which is to say, humanly fabricated devices or systems whose
scale reaches that of a world, technoscientific creations of ours that finally
exceed us in such a way that, instead of relating to them from a stance of
distance and independence (as with the “representational” relation between
subject and object in Heidegger’s account of modern Western metaphysics),
we actually live and move within them and find ourselves shaped by them:
“We dwell in them as in a world.”^55 At this level, the “object” of human thought
and action, much like Hayles’s distributed systems or Taylor’s networks, would
differ from any object that might be set apart and placed securely in front of a
subject, defined discretely, circumscribed and hencelocated^56 in such a way as
to fall under the conceptual or practical hold, mastery, or possession of that
subject. The “world-object,” in short, puts us “in the presence of a world that
we can no longer treat as an object,”^57 a world no longer passive but actively—
interactively—engaged with us.