ideas

Michel Serres on Bridges

Method or hyphen, those are soft bridges; viaduct or bridge, those are hard unions or methods. Watch: I am constructing a new footbridge; moving from matter to the sign and from the abstract to the concrete, I am bridging the hard and the soft. Whether of one or the other kind, I find bridges everywhere. Examples: the method of translation mobilises two grammars and a bilingual dictionary, it bridges languages; the method for producing living mutation moves through genetic manipulations; it bridges organisms and soon species; the method for transmuting elements passes through radioactive decay; it bridges inert bodies. Bridging, respectively, languages, living beings and elements, we bridge, transversely, the soft empire of signs with the hard realms of physics and biology… First labour, to build bridges in the hard; second work, to think of soft bridges. To launch oneself between the second and the first, the final enterprise. Bridging, in general, becomes an activity so large that it coincides perhaps with the whole human project, in that our very body bridges flesh and word. Homo pontifex. (Serres 2006, 77)