Only for Washington
zoey3000
Essay2.pdf
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Taking Michel Serres' figure of the Parasite as a starting point, track some of the ways in
which abstract dynamics are materialised and invented in cultural practice.
Walking through the Geffrye Museum of the Home in Hoxton at noon on a weekday is a
complicated modern experience.
“Look” says a man to his young daughter “can you see how the house has changed,
doesn't it look different?”
It does, there is no denying it.
The museum consists of a series of chronologically organised ‘period rooms’ leading the
viewer through the ages from 1630 right up to the present day. Visitors are invited to consider
the changing styles of domesticity, chairs, textiles, dining habits, within an imagined London
terrace house. Each room is historically crystallised, a set piece of the times; a stage for
episodic imaginings. There is an 1745 parlour with matching red velvet curtains and seat slips
which complement the dark wood and Japanned cabinets and sideboard.There is an 1830
drawing room with cobalt blue chaise longues and a crackling, projected-image fire for ladies to
warm their feet by. There is an 1936 flat with it’s ubiquitous faded avocado color scheme and an
early television set in the corner, towards which every flower-print upholstered armchair, with
matching antimacassar, is keenly pointing.
The museum, so says the brochure, is limited to the domesticity of the middle classes.
Yet each room seems expectant, primed for the entrance of B-list actors from BBC period
dramas and adaptations: Downton Abbey, Great Expectations, Return to Cranford, Abigail's
party, The Good Life. The period-drama imagination, it seems, has already been colonised by
television.
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The last display room is a reasonably contemporary ‘studio-style loft,’ complete with
abstract paintings, flat-packed bookshelves and compact kitchen units. Here, the middle-class
Londoner could, presumably, insert themselves as the protagonist in the piece. However, if you
too had been visiting the Geffrye Museum of the Home on this particular afternoon, if you too
had run the gauntlet of school trips, overpriced food and informative displays, contemplating
curated slices of history from the early 15th century to the present day; you would have seen
me- the scruffy nearly-thirty middle-class mature student- standing in front of the last room, with
most of my earthly possessions slung over my shoulder, having been asked to vacate my flat
earlier that day, seething in silence before a fantasy i could never possibly afford.
So where is the parasite?
The Parasite
Most essays written about The Parasite by Michel Serres include two things: 1) a
warning of the book’s impenetrability and 2) the itemisation of the French definitions of Parasite.
In the translator’s introduction of The Parasite (Serres 2007) Laurence R. Schehr writes:
“the parasite is a microbe, an insidious infection that takes without giving and weakens without
killing. The parasite is also a guest, who exchanges his talk, praise, and flattery for food. The
parasite is noise as well, the static in a system or the interference in a channel.” (Serres 2007
px) These multiple meanings are symptomatic of the very framework Serres is trying to
champion. He describes his book as fuzzy: “Mathematicians call this new rigor “fuzzy”: fuzzy
subsets, fuzzy topology. They should be thanked: we have needed this fuzziness for centuries.
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While waiting for it, we seemed to be playing the piano with boxing gloves on, in our world of
stiff logic without broad concepts...my book is rigorously fuzzy.” (Serres 2007 p57) Indeed,
tucked away in the text, is another translator’s note on “fuzzy”: “Flou means “nebulous,” “blurry,”
“fuzzy,” “cloudy,” and so forth. I have chosen fuzzy as a translation because of the use of the
word in mathematics...the reader should bear in mind, however, the meanings of the word flou.”
(Serres 2007 p56) This polysemic lexicon is all very admirable, but it makes summarizing The
Parasite a nightmare.
Having to bear in mind the multiple meanings of words while assuming one translator's
decision, is perhaps one of the reasons that only 11 of Serres’s 44 books have been translated
into English. Steven Connor adds “After a determined flurry of activity in the 1990s, translators
seem to have given up the struggle to keep up with Serres’s torrential output. I think it may also
be because his work is distinguished from that of many of his contemporaries by a disinclination
to cabin or crib his thinking or its implications in any one form or idiom of thought” (Connor 2009
p1)
But why dwell on all this? Many books are hard to read, but the two things often written
about The Parasite, namely that it is dense and that the eponymous “parasite” has many
translations, are really one and the same concern. They are part of a stylistic choice which
spans Serres’s work and one that is quite deliberate. At the end of the introduction, Cary Wolf
writes “to paraphrase Serres’s philosophical soulmate, Deleuze, Serres is not content to say
that we must rethink certain notions, redefine certain concepts; he doesn't say it, does not argue
for it, he just does it, and in so doing, he sets out new coordinates for the praxis of thinking.”
(Serres 2007 pxxv)
Just as Deleuze and Guattari took a decision to write A Thousand Plateaus as a
‘rhizome-book’ (Deluze and Guattari 1987) in the manner of their theory, Serres’s The Parasite
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is what Wolf calls a “book made of books, a text made of texts...Serres’s work, in a profound
sense, struggles against clarity, which is to say that it struggles, in a way, against language
itself.” (Serres 2007 pxxII) Therefore, before starting on a close reading of Serres, we must
consider Conner’s warning:
“Serres’s is a work that does not seem to allow short-cuts, does not surrender easily to
the economy of synecdoche, or permit the parsimony of paraphrase...Read some way
into any Michel Serres book, and you will find yourself having made headway with them
all; but you will have to read them all before you can finish reading the one you have in
your hand. As a result, the reader of Serres finds himself subject to a growing
compulsion to quote at length, the feeling that the only way to render the work would be
to reproduce it, to subject oneself to rather than summarising it.” (Connor 2009 p3)
Taking the figure of Serres’s parasite as a starting point, is not an entirely hopeless task,
as long as the figure of the parasite is never considered a stable, rational or reliable entity. The
style and spirit in which the book is written must always be taken into account, a reading must
remain fuzzy, not fixed, because ultimately The Parasite has to do with communication,
relations and noise. It would be inappropriate to assume the text as a rigid, cookie-cutter
framework. For my essay I will focus on the abstract concepts of irreversible history and noise,
but I make no excuses for the roundabout manner in which these theories present themselves
as I believe it would be disingenuous to write a straightforward summary.
*
The Parasite uses as its backbone, a text by La Fontaine, which itself takes from
Aesop’s fable of two rats and a farmer. The city rat invites the country rat to enjoy a feast in the
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house of a tax farmer. However, the feast is interrupted by a noise at the door, the spooked
country rat flees the house proclaiming: “Let’s go to the country where we eat only soup, but
quietly and without interruption.” (Serres 2007 p3)
Serres goes onto twist, invert, redefine, change his mind, deconstruct and recompose
this tale throughout the book, identifying parasites and the parasitic transactions within the tale.
For Serres the country mouse is a parasite to the city mouse, who is a parasite to the tax
farmer, who himself is a parasite to the producer of the meal and all are subjected to the
parasite of the noise. Crucially though, Serres writes: “the flow goes one way, never the other. I
call this semiconduction, this valve, this single arrow, this relation without the reversal of
direction, ‘parasitic.’” (Serres 2007 p5)
Figure 1
This parasitic direction, i.e. an univalent direction, is in keeping with Serres’ larger
conception of history. Influenced by nineteenth century thermodynamics, especially its inclusion
of time into the science of things, Serres repeatedly emphasises the cumulative, irreversible
nature of time. As Brown puts it in In Praise of the Parasite:
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“The processes that define living cannot be run backwards to reveal their initial
conditions, in the way that that is suggested by ‘clock time’. Living is decent, a downward
progress from differentiation through a long series of equilibriums that follow the
energetic thalweg leading toward indifferentiation and eventual stability: death” (Brown
2013 p84)
The parasite operates within these constraints, Serres calls it “the parasitic cascade.”
(Serres 2007) However the parasite is ‘fuzzy’ it can morph. In The Parasite there is a myriad of
characters: three rats, a snake, an athlete, a farmer, a paralytic, a blind man, two ducks, a
tortoise and so on, “the infinite number of parasitic relations.” (Serres 2007 p99) These figures
switch and morph between parasites, hosts, guests and intruders “the parasited one parasites
the parasite.” (Serres 2007 p13) In the book there is no one figure who can lay sole claim to the
role of the parasite, even the rats. This is because the parasite operates within relations.
In a chapter called The Best Definition (bearing in mind there are many definitions for the
parasite in the book) Serres calls the parasite a “thermal exciter” (Serres 2007 P190)
“The parasite… far from transforming a system, changes its nature, its form, its
elements, its relations and its pathways… the parasite makes it (the system) change
states differentially. It inclines it. It makes the equilibrium of the energetic distribution
fluctuate. It dopes it. It irritates it. It inflames it.” (Serres 2007 p191)
So, bearing in mind its fuzziness, its ability to morph, its resistance to figuration and its
systematic nature, let us see if we can find the parasite at work in the Geffrye museum.
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Rooms
As we have established, the parasite operates within a cascade, one that moves in one
direction, with irreversible time. However, in the Geffrye Museum, one can travel back and
forwards with ease from room to room, era to era, comparing and contrasting the domestic
spaces of history. This contradicts Serres’s historical thinking.
It is important, from the start, to identify the systems at work here. There is more than
one. We need to deconstruct the museum into its various systems. The Geffrye Museum is a
series of rooms within a series of rooms, one set of rooms are part of an exhibition, the other set
is subject to the wear and tear of everyday life. This is an important distinction.
In the general leaflet the Geffrye Museum claims the displays show : “...how the rooms
were heated, lit and lived in, show how they altered over time, responding to changes in
domestic life and the wider world.” So, here the wider world completes the system, therefore
both the display rooms of the exhibition and public rooms: the cafe, the hall, the cloak room of
the museum’s infrastructure (an old Alms House) must be considered. Through the relation
between these two systems, the museum tries to recreate a more holistic representation of
historic domesticity and historic society, (Leibnitz analogy of fish and pools comes to mind)
But why would the observation of furnishing/lighting/workings of one room bring us
closer to the societies of the time? Serres’s mentor Gaston Bachelard has this to say: “Space
that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to
measures and estimates of the surveyor.” (Bachelard p13) Here, Bachelard takes the first steps
in understanding how the room’s representational powers are activated by the viewer.
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In his book Poetics of Space Bachelard seeks to develop a “phenomenology of
imagination.” (Bachelard p3) using the house as his field of investigation. “The house” he writes
“is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of
mankind.” (Bachelard p28) He goes on to interrogate the house, the cellar, the tower, the
garrett, the room, wardrobes, draws and corners, identifying in each a strong poetic
“resonance-reverberation” (Bachelard) which acts on the memory and the imagination.
Figure 2
We can feel this process is at work standing in front of the period rooms of the Geffrye
museum. A Walnut wood corner cupboard, a green felt card table, a wide open hearth or a
teapot, can become “subject-objects” in the poetic imagination as the past and the present
come together with a view to the future. (Bergson 2004) However, the subject-objectivity of
these objects, the memory imbued in the matter, is itself highly subjective. For example, these
poetic imaginings: oak panelling imbued with the dread of traditional, restrictive space such as
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the school or the club, a display cabinet filled with white bone china with a fussy, grandmotherly
feeling of care, are limited to one subjectivity: mine, as I am the surveyor. Another surveyor will
understand the room differently. An 1830 checkers board or an art nouveau bookshelf probably
may mean nothing to you, yet everything to me. So, yes, there are poetics in these spaces, but
they must be given rhythm by a willing imagination.
Matthew Fuller wrote “...(it is) the explosiveness and precision with which it explores and
establishes its dimensions of relationality that marks poetry, and it is by means of these qualities
that it escapes simple identification as memetic.” (Fuller 2006 p33) This distinction is important,
because there are also dead objects in the period rooms that strike no phenomenological
resonance with the viewer, (again depending on subjectivity) and therefore recede into
memetics.
A table in the 1910 drawing room looks like any other table. I read, from a display plaque
that it is part of the Arts and Craft movement, fashionable with aesthetes of the time. I have
identified my information, the table is just a table, a simple meme. It does not dance like Marx’s
fetisized table, (Marx 2005) it does not resonate in my poetic imagination. But an old man next
to me is weeping at the sight of it. What is going on? Is the old man a more important viewer
than me, giving this table subjecthood, giving matter memory? Before I can ask, the old man
moves to the next display, to 1930, where more memories await him. Meanwhile a little girl is
being dragged away by her mother in the opposite direction, kicking and screaming, furious,
bored by these dead old things. Her mother is equally cross that the girl is not behaving herself,
a train rumbles past on the overground line from Dalston to New Cross, an invigilator yawns and
a country rat runs across my shoe, fleeing the room, to escape all the noise.
Here we are looking at relations of representation. Poetics and memetics go some way
to explain the subject’s influence on the process, but Serres tells us that, as energy is being
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turned into information, there is always waste: “if information was equal to energy, we would all
be gods.” (Serres 2007 p99). The museum sets up objects within a space to transfer
information. Yet the transference is not clean, perfect, silent.
Serres urges us to listen to the noise, not as a by-product, but as part of the system. The
parasite is noise.
Noise, feedback and entropy describe similar processes in different disciplines: feedback
in cybernetics (information,) entropy in thermodynamics (energy) (Connor 2009) and there are
elements of both in what Serres calls noise. Noise gets in the way of the simple historical
information of the rooms, it parasites the transference.
*
If this is the case, then we need to ascertain where the noise is coming from. In this
instance, the parasite is noise, but the room and the noise are the only players in this game.
There are no rats because there are no meals in these rooms.
This leads us to question the period rooms. Why are they inhospitable? Here we can
identify the cultural practice of preservation within the museum: preservation is anti-parasitic.
Serres writes “health is the silence of the body.” (Serres 2007 p125) The exhibition
rooms are silent, for all their glamour and decoration, for all the memories and representations
they hold, they are just that, representations and artificial spaces. History or irreversible time,
has been emptied out, or at least artificially slowed.
There are two giveaways in the period rooms: 1) the project-image fire in the grate of the
1790s parlour that will never burn and 2) the plastic sandwich on the table of the 1960s living
room will never rot. “Rotting and plague are not only symbols of violence but also real, singular
referents that only need themselves to give rise to clearly defined processes.” (Serres 2007
p156)
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Figure 3
There is nothing for rats to eat in the period rooms because they show only a
representation of space, not lived space (Lefebvre 1991.) So does the analogy break down
here? Not necessarily. I would argue that one should view the period rooms not as rooms, but
as meals. If we take the rooms as meals, the museum as host and the viewers as the rats, then
the parasitic cascade, with all its noise and disorder is restored.
However, there is another problem. If the rooms preserve history and work outside the
remit of irreversible time, (anti-parasitic) then how do we understand their historic order? How
do we account for chronology?
Clock Time
Now that we have identified some of the representational systems at work and
re-orientated the rooms as meals in order to re-engage with the parasitic system- including the
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essential disruptive parasitic noise- we can begin to understand the rooms’ relations to each
other. But first, we have to go back to the issue of clock-time.
As Brown said earlier “living is decent” rather than ordered ‘clock time,’ but what is clock
time? “Clock-time was for Bergson a way of spatializing time, and as such, it really isn’t time, it’s
a form of space.” (Vitale 2011 p1) Christian Vitale describes this conception as a string of pearls
each representing a moment, like the ticking of the arms of a clock. (Vitale 2011) Bergson is
very influential in Serres work, his theories appear throughout the text.
Rather than ‘living as decent’ or a parasitic cascade, the rooms are actually a
representation of space as “clock time.” The rooms then do not contain a slice of time from 1650
or 1935, only a curated space, an arrangement of objects masquerading as time. This is
important. This chronology is a trick, the lie of clock-time. It appears natural to us (the
observers) because history is often presented to us in this way. However it only takes a minute
of contemplation to unpick the system.
Chronological organisation asks the viewer to consider all the rooms as the same room,
spread out on a timeline, each room having been subjected to a different amount of time, forced
into change according to the tastes of the period. But we know that each room is, in its matter,
entirely different, subject to the same time at the same pace, (an interesting idea to consider is
whether the objects strive to make the room look old, or whether the room strives to make the
objects look young.) We can see that the one-way arrow of time is not acting laterally from left to
right, 1630 to the present day, but universally, through every room at the same (artificially
slowed) speed. If the chronology was to be believed then each object in each room would be
roughly the same age, yet we know this is not true. If the room was really the same, it would be
impossible to see past the present.
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Serres writes: “History is the river of circumstances and no longer the old orbit of the
mechanists.” (Serres 2007 p20) In this he is in agreement with Bergson who rejected “clock
time.” This is what Serres means by the parasitic cascade only going one way, the “...simple
arrows, pointing in only one direction.”
In truth there is no theoretical link between the rooms, none whatsoever. Time does not
preserve order. As the great dystopian J.G. Ballard said “society is a stage set, one that can be
swept away at any time.” (Ballard 1997 p65) .The rooms in the Geffrye Museum will never be
replaced, destroyed, become outdated or decay. It is the chronology, or clock-time, the false link
that gives the impression of passing time, but in reality the rooms are only a sequence of
spaces.
The false link between the rooms is an abstract dynamic maintained by the cultural
production of the museum. It is anti-parasitic. The rooms are like a string of meals, a string of
consumable spaces pretending to show the passing of time. However, once these false links
are exposed, we can better understand the relations at work.
Meals
The parasite overhauls the deception of clock time, debunks chronology. Still, this is not
to say that the rooms are in not inter-connected. The rooms are still bound in relation to each
other, within a false system, bound by the museum and the viewer.
If we think of the rooms as frames in a film, then in the blank spaces between the
frames, parasites have infiltrated.
Tastes and fashions are deeply parasitic. The move away from Art Deco to Minimalism
occurred through interruption and oscillation. The parasite gets “branches into the channel”
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(Serres 2007 p35) the system shifts. “The parasite invents something new. Since he does not
eat like everyone else, he builds new logics.” (ibid)
So, although the system is manufactured by cultural production, the reality being imitated
is relational, parasitic. I.e. the representation of space is hostile to the parasite, but the reality it
represents is parasitic. (Serres 2007) The reordering of the rooms, the divans that replace the
armchairs, the softwood that replaces hardwood, the blinds that replace curtains, these trends
were real, part of irreversible time, they are part of the parasitic cascade. Like Benjamin’s
Anglus Novas (Angel of History) “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain
of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of
his feet.” (Benjamin 1988) The parasite drives this ruin, while moving in the same direction,
re-arranging, re-constituting, morphing. But this is not a change of regime, a handover of power,
an ordered change, this change come from chaos, from noise, from infiltration, the host-guest
relation ”...this power comes simply from the fact that he is the relation and not fixed in the
essence.” (Serres 2007 p156) However in the Geffrye Museum, the parasite is hidden. Noise
comes from between the walls, not the rooms, noise is outside the rooms, between the rooms,
the rooms are silent. The parasite is hidden.
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Figure 4
The Last Room
Serres Writes: “Man milks the cow, makes the steer work, makes a roof from the tree;
they have all decided who the parasite is. It is man...History says so without symbols, without
translations or displacements. But history hides the fact that man is the universal parasite, that
everything and everyone around him is a hospitable space.” (Serres 2007 p128)
As I contemplate the final room, with most of the historical baggage stripped away, I
must conclude then that I am the parasite. I am the country rat, but what am I parasiting? This
room is communicating something different from all the others, here I am jealous. This jealousy
springs from the concept of private property.
On the issue of property Serres is somewhat of a hard-liner. “If property were not
founded on murder alone, history would not be quite what it is, a river swelling with entreaties,
blood and tears” (Serres 2007 p140) Serres compares the concept of private property to dogs
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pissing on roots or guests who spit in the salad: “Whoever was a lodger for a long time... will
remember someone not willing to divide the salad course.” (ibid)
Serres equates economy directly with violence. “The first person who, having enclosed a
terrain decided to say this is mine, was a dead man, for he immediately gave rise to the
assassin.” (Serres 2007 p141) Yet, standing at the final room, coveting the space, the stability
and the assurance such a place would afford me, I do not feel like a parasite or an assassin. I
feel like the unwanted guest, the third position. “The jealous excludes the third. He invents the
excluded third.” (Serres 153) Serres urges the excluded third to be “the cuckold,” to be included
in the system. To understand this I want to include a text of my own.
In The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass, the protagonist, a stunted 3ft tall dwarf with sonic
powers called Little Oscar sing-shatters holes into the windows of jewellery stores and delights
in watching ordinary folk reach in and steal diamond necklaces.
He watched the people passing dark store windows, waiting for someone who seemed
tempted by a certain object. Then he would sing out a section of the window with his
voice, making a circular cut in the glass. He would watch as the person would slip the
coveted object into their coat and move along. (Grass 2010 p78)
This is the sort of noise I need, the ideal third, a direct intervention. Of course, if i did
reach into the 1998 loft-style apartment room, I would come out with nothing, The room is a
black box, a meal, a representation. However it is a representation of the contemporary, the
now. In this way, it differs from the other rooms and induces jealousy.
“Power” Serres tells us “is nothing but the occupation of space.” (Serres 2007 p142)
Serres sees this occupation of space, this marking of territory as akin to soiling an area to
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prevent others coming close (para means distance from) “Those who see only public space
have no sense of smell. As soon as you soul it, however, it is yours.” (Serres 2007 p167) Can
we see then the objects in the rooms, the beautiful furnishings, as mere historical soilings?
Perhaps this is the consumable quality of the rooms as meals, we covet the crystallized property
of others. The shit of historical belonging. It seems less enticing than diamonds.
However Serres turns to agriculture to show that actually, it is in empty, rather than the
full space where power is defined. He used the example of a field, where everything is torn up,
homogenised, covered in silt, “the abstract space from which everything was subtracted, from
which everything was uprooted, from which everything was taken away.” (Serres 2007 p170)
This may seem counter intuitive, given the stuffed rooms, the conception of wealth as the
accumulation of things, but Serres identifies the power of the pure white space:
Agriculture and culture have the same origin of the same foundation, a white spot that
realises a rupture of equilibrium, a clean spot constituted through expulsion. A spot of
propriety or cleanliness, spot of belonging. (Serres 2007 p179)
Walking around areas in London that are undergoing development, one can see this
agricultural clearing, this desire for what Serres calls “the white domino.” (ibid) Rather than
expand or maintain or interact with the existing network or system, the area is wiped clean,
tabula rosa, like farmers clearing a field. This “invention of empty space” strikes me as deeply
colonial. But what has it got to do with the Geffrye Museum? With the parasite? With Little Oscar
and the rats?
Little Oskar disrupts the rhythm of city life in The Tin Drum by cutting holes in the shop
windows, creating a direct link between inside and outside, the excluded third and the system.
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But this is not how the parasite operates. Little Oskar gets caught breaking windows, Little
Oskar is not a parasite. The parasite imitates the host, the parasite disrupts systematically.
Earlier in The Tin Drum, Little Oskar does act like a parasite when he sits in the grandstand and
disrupts the rhythm of the marching band at Nazi rallies by playing his drum.
I broke up rallies, reduced speakers to stutters, and turned marches and hymns into
waltzes and foxtrots.(Grass 2010 p81)
Little Oskar interrupts and influences the system by making noise, by entering the
system as “a cuckold.” In these two instances a disruption occurs, but in only one does the
parasite morph into the relation, “occupy the channel” (Serres 2007 p45). Only in the bandstand
does noise affect the system.
“The noise stops, someone leaves, someone, anyone: both formal and random.” Noise
re-orders systems, but as we have seen, it can perform metamorphosis- the noise is sometimes
an animal, the noise is sometimes Little Oskar.
Serres agonises about the difference between noise and music, contained within is the
deeper debate between harmony and chaos. For Serres the collective is “a black box of noise”
(Serres 2007) A black box is a concept lifted from system analytic mathematics. Black boxes are
“a device of which one may precisely specify the input on one side, and equally precisely
describe the output on the other, but be unable to describe in detail what happens in the
middle.” (Conners p8) Serres realises, that in a multitude, collective or plurality, noise
overwhelms, one cannot see inside the workings of many relations, hence the black box.
However, Serres sees this chaos as warding off repetition and homogeneity “noise destroys and
horrifies. But order and flat repetition are in the vicinity of death.” Music, or the “miracle’ of
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harmony, like a line of notes can emerge “islands of coherence appear that had not been
perceived” (Serres 2007 p151) and the parasite switches definitions, becomes guest, becomes
disease, become figure, morphs. “Noise gives rise to a new system, an order, that is more than
a simple chain” (Serres p140.)
*
The figure of the parasite is notable by its absence in the display rooms of the Geffrye
Museum. The abstract dynamics of this system are designed to ward off the parasite. But
parasitism is teeming all around the rooms of the Geffrye museum, in the walls, in the spaces
between, in the cafe and the bookshop, behind the counter, in the lockers of the cloakroom, the
noise is deafening. The rooms seek to empty and purify these relations, to clean up and present
perfect historic meals, which we, as rats, enjoy. Veiled under the banner of chronological
history, we can parasite the cultural belonging of our historical forebears, but confronted with
representations of the now, we feel cheated. Confronted with the realities of property and an
economy which Serres says “relies on violence,” we realise we are being excluded. Noise
comes from the wider world again, this time it is the world outside the museum, the noise of the
streets, of London, of the conditions of the present. The period rooms become black boxes, the
noise spooks the rats, the system changes.
Conclusion
I have attempted to conduct an investigation in the spirit of the text. The Parasite is no
textbook, it relies on ‘fuzzy logic.’ In this way it is wholly different from the museum, which relies
on order. The figure of the parasite seeks to disrupt order, the museum attempts to restore
order through space. I have focusses on the false ordering of time, (against the parasitic
cascade,) and the concept of noise. This interior/exterior struggle, the processes of
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belonging/exclusion that defines the abstract dynamics within the system. The museum relies
on the cultural production of chronology and representation to stabilize its display. But the
parasite is always looking for a way in.
The disorientating effect of the museum stems from this dichotomy between the
displacement in time and the parasitic noise of the present. Walking through the display rooms
the viewer is accosted by both systems. The further through the rooms the viewer gets, the
more like the real world the representations become, but the network of relations get
increasingly harder to untangle. Like Leibniz's fractal analogy of pools and fish in which there
are pools and fish, the system can feel like rooms considering rooms considering rooms.
(Leibniz 1989)
Stepping back into the real world, back to the total chaos of the city, felt like a relief.
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Bibliography
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Index Figure 1: Diagram from Serres, M., 2007. The Parasite, Minneapolis.p4 Figure 2: A drawing room in 1830 - photography Chris Ridley http://www.geffrye-museum.org.uk/explore-the-geffrye/period_rooms/drawing-room-1830/ Figure 3: Photo of plastic sandwich Taken by the author Figure 4: A loft-style apartment in 1998 photographed by Chris Ridley http://www.geffrye-museum.org.uk/explore-the-geffrye/period_rooms/loft-style-apartment-1998/
