Michel Serres, “The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, & Thermodynamic”
It is a river that flows and yet remains stable in the continual collapse of its banks and the irreversible erosion of the mountains around it. One always swims in the same river, one never sits down on the same bank. The fluvial basin is stable in its flux and the passage of its chreodes; as a system open to evaporation, rain, and clouds, it always-but stochastically-brings back the same water. What is slowly destroyed is the solid basin. The fluid is stable; the solid which wears away is unstable - Heraclitus and Parmenides were both right. Hence the notion of homeorrhesis.(3) The living system is homeorrhetic.
This river, almost stable although irreversible, this basin, poised on its own imbalance in a precarious state of quasi-equilibrium in its flow toward death, ferries energy and information, knowledge of entropy and negentropy, of order and disorder. Both a syrrhesis (rather than a system) and a diarrhesis,(4) the organism is hence defined from a global perspective. Not actually defined (the word means in effect the opposite of open), but assessed, described, evaluated, and understood. Or, within the context of an even more general circulation which goes from the sun to the black depths of space, the organism is a barrier of braided links that leaks like a wicker basket but can still function as a dam. Better yet, it is the quasistable turbulence that a flow produces, the eddy closed upon itself for an instant, which finds its balance in the middle of the current and appears to move upstream, but is in fact undone by the flow and re-formed elsewhere. And experience shows that there is no flux without eddy, no laminar flow which does not become turbulent.(5) Now, and here is the crux of the matter, all times converge in this temporary knot: the drift of entropy or the irreversible thermal flow, wear and aging, the exhaustion of initial redundancy, time which turns back on feedback rings or the quasi-stability of eddies, the conservative invariance of genetic nuclei, the permanence of a form, the erratic blinking of aleatory mutations, the implacable filtering out of all non-viable elements, the local flow upsteam toward negentropic islands-refuse, recycling, memory, increase in complexities.
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