Michel Serres' Dark Society

Michel Serres' Dark Society is an urgent call to re-examine our dominant social order in a time of tremendous uncertainty and impending catastrophe, examining how social thought might be reoriented for the Anthropocene by engaging seriously with the work of Michel Serres.Bucking the trend of contemporary social science to treat societal problems as purely dysfunctional and unintended, Steven Brown asks: what if social order is itself a provisional and unstable arrangement? What kind of social science is needed to understand communities living together on borrowed time? Using Michel Serres’ concept of entanglement, this rigorous and accessible book brings his ideas into the sphere of the social sciences, exploring sustainable new ways of living together in the Anthropocene. This new ‘dark’ world is a place of violence, noise and parasites, and swarms of animals – all metaphors that underpin Serres’ worldview and create an entirely new vision of volatile, often feral co-habitation. Situating Serres within contemporary debates in social theory, science and technology studies, and Anthropocene scholarship, Michel Serres' Dark Society offers a non-foundational introduction that resists system-building in favour of interference, translation, and variation. In doing so, it argues that Serres provides not a theory of solutions, but a set of conceptual resources for rethinking what it means to live together amid ecological crisis, technological expansion, and planetary uncertainty.