Zaag de tak waarop je zit niet af

This article explores Michel Serres’ ethics of noise in response to the common assertion that structuralist or anti-humanist thought lacks a normative basis. Rather than grounding ethics in the human subject — its nature, reason or rights — Serres locates normativity in the world’s own complexity: the flows of information and noise that sustain diversity across different levels of reality. Drawing on information theory, particularly the work of Léon Brillouin and Henri Atlan, Serres does not view noise as a threat to order, but rather as a condition of transformation and renewal. His concept of nested systems enables us to reinterpret contemporary ecological and political crises as conflicts between levels of organization, where higher systems exploit or exhaust the ‘noise’ of lower ones. By situating ethics in the maintenance of diversity and the protection of generative noise, Serres offers a framework for rethinking responsibility in the Anthropocene not as mastery over the world, but as a practice of preserving the conditions for its continued complexity.