phase-lock

 

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We huge many-celled creatures have to coordinate millions of different oscillation frequencies, and interactions among frequencies, in our bodies and our environment. Most of the coordination is effected by synchronising the pulses, by getting the beats into a master rhythm, by entrainment…

Being in sync—internally and with your environment—makes life easy. Getting out of sync is always uncomfortable or disastrous. Then there are the rhythms of other human beings. Like the two pendulums, though through more complex processes, two people together can mutually phase-lock. 

Successful human relationship involves entrainment—getting in sync. If it doesn’t, the relationship is either uncomfortable or disastrous…

Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in—become part of the action.


—Ursula K. Le Guin
Telling is Listening
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

 

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[…] for Serres, information is emitted, stored, processed and received by all entities, from humans to crystals, and human communication is only a quiet whisper in the cacophony of the information exchange between entities in the world. 

Where Morton’s ecomimesis remains anthropocentric (for only people do ‘nature writing’), Serres’ Great Story is geocentric in a way that does not exclude human communication, but does not give it a qualitatively privileged status either. 

So for Morton, a mark will always be “either a squiggle or a letter” (Ecology 50), with nothing in between, but Serres is painting on a broader canvas and, for him, what might be a squiggle or a letter for us human beings (or neither, if its information falls outside our visible spectrum or range of audible frequencies, for example) could well carry a thousand different meanings to a thousand different information receivers, and be meaningless or inexistent to ten thousand more.


—Christopher Watkin
Michel Serres’ Great Story: From Biosemiotics to Econarratology

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The role of the infinitely small in nature is infinitely large. 

—Louis Pasteur

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