Michel Serres' Dark Society

An exploration of Michel Serres’ dark vision of society, shining a light on new routes forward for the social sciences in the Anthropocene.

Michel Serres' Dark Society is an urgent call to re-examine our dominant social order in a time of tremendous uncertainty and impending catastrophe.

Bucking the trend of contemporary social science to treat societal problems as Grand Challenges to be solved through instrumental interdisciplinary collaboration, Steven D. Brown asks: what if social order is itself a provisional and unstable arrangement? What kind of transdisciplinary social science is needed to understand communities living together on borrowed time?

Our ‘dark’ world is a place of violence, noise, parasites, and swarms of animals – all figures of thought that underpin Michel Serres’ worldview, and create an entirely new vision of volatile, often feral co-habitation. Drawing on a range of Serres’ concepts, Brown brings his ideas into the sphere of the social sciences to rethink what it means to live together amid ecological crisis, technological expansion, and planetary uncertainty.

By situating Serres within contemporary debates in social theory, science and technology studies, and Anthropocene scholarship, this rigorous and accessible book ultimately offers a non-foundational introduction that resists system-building in favour of interference, translation, and variation.