Michel Serres: Science, Translation and the Logic of the Parasite

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Abstract
The work of Michel Serres has not found a great audience within Anglophone Social Science, despite his substantial influence on modem Science Studies. This article offers an introduction to his thought. Serres is a global thinker who describes his work as 'structuralist'. The notion of translation as a way of describing the communication and movements between different forms of knowledge and cultural practice is central. Serres offers a philosophy of science that is in stark opposition to the Bachelardian tradition of 'epistemic ruptures'. In order to make a break with 'breaks', Serres offers an account of science and cultural practice as multiplicities that are immersed within noise. Structure, when it emerges, comes about in acts of parasitism. Serres then explores how human relations obey a 'parasite logic' which contains an attendant risk of sacrifice. This risk is managed through the circulation of 'quasi-objects'. Serres' later work poses the question of what we can hope for when this circulation itself begins to falter.

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