"I imagine entropy as a lukewarm paste"

I've been reading Nicolas Bourriaud's The Radicant, his extended essay on the emerging (or emerged) altermodern world that we now live in. It's fascinating reading, and compared to Relational Aesthetics, which suffered from terrible translation, is lucid, and flowing, and, possibly, a "joy to read".

In a section of the first third of the book, devoted to the theoretical aspects of the altermodern (as opposed to aesthetic or political aspects), Bourriaud gives an insight into a now largely forgotten, though near-prophetic, French poet called Victor Segalen. Arriving in Polynesia as a French navy medic in 1903, he just missed Gauguin, although he apparently found the paint in the easel "still wet". He became a defender of the natives of the islands, passionately fighting (incredibly iconoclastically) against the ravages of colonialism.

Bourriaud writes: "It is truly an aesthetics of diversity Segalen means to write, a defence of heterogeneity, of the value of the plurality of worlds, a plurality menaced by the civilizing machine of the West".

He wrote this defence in a book entitled Essay on Exoticism. As Bourriaud points out, the title is ironic; he quotes Segalen's disdain for exoticism (what Edward Said would later called Orientalism) as a succession of cliches: "palm tree and camel, black skins and yellow sun".

Segalen saw diversity as the source of all beauty, but also as its driving energy. Influenced, (not quite so iconoclastically), by prevailing thermodynamic theories, Segalen saw diversity as the key weapon against an encroaching entropy. Diversity - difference - was a constantly renewing force. This does not mean to keep people in arbitrarily designated boxes, nor does it mean to restrict criticism (I cannot criticise a novel by a black writer because I'm not black, etc...). Later in his life, after returning to Paris and learning Chinese, Segalen travelled to China and wrote Steles, a book that many Chinese consider part of their own literary canon. As Bourriaud writes: "written in French, but on a Chinese wavelength." Segalen's ideas of difference do not mean one can "become Chinese, but one can attain the ability to articulate Chinese thought".

Segalen coined a term for the figure who could travel between cultures, voyage between ideas, experience this difference: the exote. The exote is "one who manages to return to himself after having undergone the experience of diversity".