SilentWords

Vera Bühlmann's Silent Words, Writing in Tongues: Architectonics and Style (Angelaki, 2024) is really a text about why Michel Serres writes the way he writes — and what architecture, music, language, mathematics and philosophy all have in common. The central question is simple: how can writing communicate something deeper than explicit meaning? Her answer is that the most important part of language is often not what the words mean, but how they sound, resonate, connect and organize experience. She calls these the silent words: the parts of writing that can't be reduced to information or semantics. Writing, for Serres, is less about delivering a message than about building a dwelling for thought.

Serres trained first as a mathematician, and only turned to philosophy later, after serving in the navy. One reason for the turn, Bühlmann reminds us, was the shock of the atomic bomb: it showed that scientific progress does not save us from violence and war. The bomb opened up a kind of power that seems to act from outside nature — and it draws its energy, literally, from light. Ever since, Serres has been writing to build what he calls a "physical culture": a way of thinking and living that could tame that power.

So for Serres, style is not decoration. It is the tool that lets thought pull away from dead ends and "come together with the formation of things." A physical culture is a culture of things that are self-sufficient — and self-sufficiency is something you have to tend and cultivate, like a plant you help to bloom, not something you grab by wanting to know it.

There's a story Serres tells about sitting in a café in Rome, surrounded by women chattering away. He barely follows the words. What he hears instead is the sound of the language — and to him it sounds like Scarlatti. Behind the meaning he catches "the scaffolding of this language, its tonal skeleton, its shrill music, its scarlet syntax."

So there are two ways to communicate. Ordinary communication just transmits information: we use words and grammar without noticing them, and "we communicate — that's all." Artistic communication does the opposite — it lets the language itself sing, and brings the meaning out of the form. A nice detail follows from this: Serres says a writer really needs only two books, a guide to good usage and a dictionary — "that is one of the reasons my books have no bibliography."

Underneath science, language and knowledge, Serres hears a deeper layer: noise, rhythm, resonance, harmony. He calls the way it all orders itself the "music sum" (musique-somme) — a kind of cosmic ordering that rises out of chaos, the way Aphrodite rises out of the sea foam. Music doesn't ask sense and meaning to be copies of itself; it simply "adds signals to noise."

And for Serres the first thing of all is not the word but rhythm. This is a point the short summaries tend to miss. Rhythm ties together two opposite movements — beating (steady, countable, repeating) and flowing (continuous, one-way) — into a single motion that keeps time. The whole universe turns this way too: galaxies, tides, weather, a spinning top, a waltz. "Make yourself a musician," Serres says, "in order to inhabit your body better."

The most important word in the paper is probably architectonics. Bühlmann borrows it from Mikhail Bakhtin (and, further back, from Lambert's Anlage zur Architectonic of 1771), who draws a careful line between composition and architectonics. The difference is sharper than just "technical vs. deep":

Bakhtin warns that we tend to "dissolve architectonic forms in composition" — to shrink the deeper organization down to mere technique, and so to miss the quiet temperament that lives under any arrangement. That quiet temperament is the silent word. Architectonics is the hidden organization of relations and values beneath a text — just as a building has a hidden structure beneath what you actually see.

A few more threads carry a lot of the paper's weight and are easy to lose in a short summary. They're worth keeping, because this is exactly where Serres ties physics, ethics and writing together into one knot.

One more figure worth carrying away. Serres has a name for the impersonal, "white" agency that can address the world only as a whole: its "proper name," the Panonyme. It comes in six parts — a quiet, precise picture of a universality that is no longer just "Man":

• Pantope — for all of its places.
• Panchrone — for all of its durations.
• Panurge — for the universal worker (the public worker — not demiurge).
• Panglosse — for all of the spoken tongues.
• Pangnose — for all of knowledge.
• Panthrope — for all sexes / all of humankind, in place of Anthropos.

"Writing in tongues" is really the practice of Panglosse: writing so that the many languages of things — mathematical, musical, material — can live together in one balanced form, without any single one of them taking over.

Vera Bühlmann directs ATTP — the Research Unit for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics at TU Wien — where much of this Serres work lives. Three ways in:

Research Unit

ATTP · TU Wien

Bühlmann's unit — architecture theory, philosophy of technics.

attp.tuwien.ac.at ↗

Reading · online copy

Silent Words · PDF

The article, hosted on alice-ch3n81 for the course.

alice-ch3n81.net ↗

Channel · Video

ATTP on YouTube

Lectures, conferences and conversations from the unit.

youtube.com ↗

• Q1Where in your own writing do you "chat," and where do you let the language sing? Can you point to a passage whose meaning emanates from its form rather than its content?
• Q2If a building has an architectonics (silent values) distinct from its composition (technical devices) — what is the architectonics of a library, an archive, an algorithm? What insists silently beneath the arrangement?
• Q3Serres says things "speak mathematics" and knowledge is translating the scattered languages of things. Whose languages does your project translate — and which ones does it silence?