Crossroads and Narrative in Serres

It may be very important for us culturally to understand what crossroads are all about. Are they places where lines cross? Roads join? Or where narrative powers are at work bringing many things together while leaving just as many possibilities still open?

Julie Heyward of the blog Unreal Nature has curated a post that is a valuable reflection on these ideas. She explains how Serres envisions crossroads much differently than people who are committed to more linear views of the world. Here's a sample:

Serres substitutes the thought of the juncture as abundance or complexification. Equally, if, self-evidently, the crossroads is not a figure establishing or confirming an identity. Nor is it one that signals the dissolution of identity or death of the subject. Identity is rather projected as a point of intersection between multiple networks.

… Literature, says Serres, in Zola, occupies language more largely than any of the logics.(This is not a value judgment, but simply the case.) For the same reason, literature is a “system of simulation” that is relatively faithful in what is at stake in the game for any of the knowledges — any of the découpages — at a particular point in space-time. Narrative will therefore stand relative to any given knowledge as a simulation of Bachelard’s ”complexité essentialle.” As such, it resists entêtement, obstinacy, stubborn persistence, the fixed idea lodged in the head, the singular, homogeneous space of the dogmatist.

Narrative is like a force that doesn't increases space as it grows, rather like a river running underground carving out caverns and passageways that in turn have all kinds of potential for animals, people and other things to move through it - possibilities are more characteristic than reductions.