His Master’s Voice: Michel Serres and The Ethics of Noise

In this article, I focus on astrand of normative judgments found in Michel Serres's work. This concerns negative evaluations of the social world. In his books, Serres often expresses very negative views of society, politics, or language, all of which in their own way distract us from nature, science, and the world. My ambition is to argue that these critiques are not incidental, but a product of his broader philosophical work and its dialogue with information theory. I will call the resulting normativity Serres's ethics of noise.