In praise of the parasite: the dark organizational theory of Michel Serres
The essay in which Brown calls Michel Serres's work on the parasite a dark organizational theory: not a theory of organisations as such but a generalised theory of ordering, mediation and relationships. It opens on the Daily Mail's thermal images of the Occupy London tents outside St Paul's in 2011, taken to show that most protesters went home or to a hotel at night. Brown renders the charge this implies: hypocrites, and parasites, taking what capitalism offers and giving nothing in return. The accusation, Brown argues, rests on a classical logic of identity, non-contradiction and mutual exclusivity that is faulty; read through Serres's The Parasite, the parasite is not an exception, a violation of sound logical and moral principles, but their very condition.
The essay gives six definitions of the parasite: the medium or being through which communication must pass; the static that interrupts the transmission of a message; the uninvited guest or social parasite; a living organism that takes without giving as it infects its host; the one who is always near to food, close to the meat; and a thermal exciter that catalyses the system to a new equilibrium state. Brown adds that noise to one party may alter what another understands, that the uninvited guest pays for the roast with stories, and that a host can adapt to its parasite and grow stronger. Through the parasite, on Brown's account, Serres redescribes communication, exchange, history, power and society as outcomes of parasitised relations; in Serres's phrase, systems work because they do not work. Parasites form cascades in which power lies with whoever comes last, the wolf's game; a group expels a parasite as a scapegoat, after Girard, and re-forms around new norms; and jokers, blank tokens that let an ordered series take a new direction, become quasi-objects, like the ball in a rugby match, whose passing makes a collective and whose stopping marks out an individual.
Brown turns the argument back on the opening case: Occupy was wise to refuse a single political position, the newspaper ought to have turned the cameras on its own newsrooms, and the London Stock Exchange, more than any other actor, deserves the title of parasite. An afterword traces Serres's influence through Actor-Network Theory and a few direct uses of the joker, the quasi-object and parasitism in geography and psychology. The bridge to psychological safety is ours: noise one party dismisses can be the signal another hears, and expelling a scapegoat to settle a group's rivalries, then re-forming around new norms, is a pattern blame cultures repeat. Built from the published article.
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