{"id":1054,"date":"2013-05-19T09:00:53","date_gmt":"2013-05-19T09:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simoningsmirror.wordpress.com\/?p=1054"},"modified":"2018-10-19T14:28:26","modified_gmt":"2018-10-19T14:28:26","slug":"summa-technologiae-by-stanislaw-lem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=1054","title":{"rendered":"Summa Technologiae by Stanislaw Lem"},"content":{"rendered":"

I reviewed this mix of prescience, philosophy and irony for New Scientist’s Culture Lab.<\/a><\/p>\n

Here’s a more relaxed version for Lem initiates:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Stanislaw<\/a>

Image shamelessly ripped from Aleksander Jalosinski http:\/\/aleksanderjalosinski.pl<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Halfway through his epic cybernetic rewiring of the Western cultural project, at the top of his rhetorical curve, and scant pages before the neologisms begin to gum and tack, tripping the reader\u2019s feet (the second half is a slog), Polish satirist Stanislaw Lem recasts the entire universe as a boarding house inhabited by Mr Smith, a bank clerk, his puritanical aunt, and a female lodger.
\nThe boarding house has a glass wall, and all the greats of science are about to look through that wall and draw truths about the universe from what they observe. Ptolemy notes how, when the aunt goes down to the cellar to fetch some vegetables, Mr Smith kisses the lodger. He develops a purely descriptive theory, \u201cthanks to which one can know in advance which position will be taken by the two upper bodies when the loqwer one finds itself in the lowest position.\u201d
\nNewton enters. \u201cHe declares that the bodies\u2019 behaviour depends on their mutual attraction.\u201d
\nSo it goes on. Heisenberg notices some indeterminacy in their behaviour: \u201cFor instance, in the state of kissing, Mr Smith\u2019s arms do not always occupy the same position.\u201d
\nAnd on. And on. Mathematics comes unstuck in the ensuing complexity, where \u201ca neural equivalent of an act of sneezing would be a volume whose cover would have to be lifted with a crane.\u201d
\nScience is steadily pushing us into a Goethian cul-de-sac in which, the more accurate our theory, the closer it comes to the phenomenon itself, in all its ambiguity, strangeness, and inexplicability. At this point, Lem says, analysis must be abandoned in favour of creative activity — \u201cimitological practice.\u201d as he would have it, \u201cconsidering the phenomenon itself its most perfect representation.\u201d
\nThere are nested ironies here, and it\u2019s the devil\u2019s work to unpick them all. Then again, any reader of Lem will have guessed this from the off, and will relish the opportunity afforded by this English translation \u2013 incredibly, for a book written in 1964 by a literary celebrity and reasonably well translated elsewhere, the first in the English language. Summa\u2019s translator is Joanna Zylinska, a professor of new media and communications at Goldsmiths. Her work is diligent, imaginative, painstakingly precise; sometimes one wishes, in the later chapters, that she would be a little more slapdash and cut to the chase a little more, but this is Lem\u2019s fault, not hers.
\nLem was a garrulous old sod who said Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 version of his novel Solaris should have been renamed “Love in Outer Space” and put up a sign outside his house warning of “ferocious dogs” (in truth, five friendly dachshunds). Though he had some important intellectual training, Lem ploughed his own furrow, conjuring with ideas that would not become common currency for another half-century:\u00a0 (virtual reality, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, technological singularity\u2026) When he succumbs to the autodidact\u2019s anxiety, his prose is not pretty.
\nBut then, Lem always worked at the edge of aesthetic possibility — which is to say, he was a science fiction writer. Science fiction is notorious for biting the hand that feeds it, for deliberately running counter to all expectation, and getting lost for decades at a time in the contested, often ugly territory where the humanities leave off and the sciences begin. Science fiction prides itself on crashing and burning, again and again, against the walls of narrative expectation and good taste. It\u2019s the Gully Foyle of literature, fearsome and deranged and perilous in its promise: a Prometheus figure shoving fire in your face. \u201cCatch this!\u201d
\nThis is what the Summa throws up: a vision of intelligence as cul-de-sac. Intelligence carries conscious beings to a point where their theories are no longer useful to them, where their hard-won objectivity drowns in a glut of complexity, and the only way to forward is for them to grow into the fabric of the world.
\nFermi\u2019s paradox: \u201cIf we are alive and intelligent and making some noise, where, in all the cosmos, is everybody else?\u201d
\nLem\u2019s answer: Look at the rocks. Intelligence is a stepping stone on a circular path back to brute is-ness.
\nSo much for cosmic irony; there\u2019s a local, political irony here too, which needs some more exploration.
\nYou see, after the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland, Lem was banned from Polytechnic study owing to his “bourgeois origin\u201d. His father pulled strings to get him accepted on a course in medicine at Lw\u00f3w University in 1940, but this brought him up against the quack theories of Stalin\u2019s intellectual poster-boy, the agronomist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. Lem satirized Lysenko in a science magazine and soon abandoned his medical studies.
\nA word about Lysenko. With the blood of millions already on his hands from collectivisation \u2013 not to mention the wholesale eradication of countless varieties of domesticated plant \u2013 Josef Stalin needed to feed what was left of his nation. He wanted food and he wanted it now. Enter Trofim Denisovich, peddling an idea of evolution already two centuries out of date. Lysenko said things change their form in response to the environment, and pass any changes directly to their offspring. No element of chance. No randomness in selection. No genetic code to learn. Giraffes have long necks because their parents stretch.
\nAnd there is no brake on this process, neither, according to Lysenko. No natural conservatism. Things want to change. They just need some kindly direction. Spin your wheel and stick in your thumbs: the living world is clay. Oats will turn to wild oats, pines to firs, sunflowers to zinnias. Animal cells will turn into plant cells. Plants into animals! Cells from soup! \u201cHow can there be hereditary diseases in a socialist society?\u201d From the nonliving will come the living.
\nFast forward twenty years, and we have the Summa, and the Summa says,
\n\u201cWe cannot therefore catalogue Nature, our finitude being one of the reasons for this. Yet we can turn Nature\u2019s infinity against it, so to speak by working, as Technologists\u2026\u201d
\nAnd what, exactly, will this work look like? (Bear in mind here that Lysenko cited the brilliant fruit-tree specialist Ivan Michurin as his intellectual forebear):
\n\u201cA scientist wants an algorithm, wheras the technologist is more like a gardener who plants a tree, picks apples, and is not bothered about \u201chow the tree did it.\u201d A scientist considers such a narrow, utiliterian and pragmatic approach a sin against the laws of Full Knowledge. It seems that those attitudes will change in the future.\u201d
\nThe Summa is not just Lem\u2019s vision of the future; it is Lysenko\u2019s.
\nOf course this (irony of ironies) doesn\u2019t mean that the vision is merely mischevious, a bitter political joke (though I think it is that). Perhaps Lem thinks Lysenko was simply ahead of his time, reaching for a plasticity in nature that it will take another century of biological research to effect.
\nPredictably, from a writer who seems permanently dangling off the edge of everyone else\u2019s intellectual curve, Lem\u2019s minatory vision is being explored and independently invented in the oddest places. Never mind the blandishments of the Kurzweilians and the extropians: Lem calls them \u201chomunculists\u201d, an inspired expression of contempt. What about Ridley Scott\u2019s movie Prometheus? What about that animate yet unliving black goo that can bring life to sterile planets, in all its savagery, appetite and guile? What about that unsmiling species of near-Gods who, having mastered birth (the sexism is deliberate and important), sets life at its own neck in the service of some unnamed Next Project? Lem would have hated it. But then, Lem was an inveterate ironist who describes the Summa itself, that most cherished project, as a \u201cslightly modernised\u2026 version of the famous Ars Magna, which clever Lullus presented quite a long time ago, that is, the the year 1300, and which was rightly mocked by Swift in Gulliver\u2019s Travels.\u201d
\nIt is not that the ironies get in the way. It\u2019s that the world itself is ironical, and Lem, with his vision-of-the-future-that-is-no-future, is its John the Baptist. Even as you follow him, watch him rip out the signposts. Even as you beg for water, watch him defecate in each and every roadside well. Gawp in dismay as he assembles Potemkin villages on the barren skyline only to kick them into the dust. Then: walk on. (It\u2019s not like you have any choice.) The path looks straight. You know it\u2019s anything but. You know, God help you, that you will come by this place again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I reviewed this mix of prescience, philosophy and irony for New Scientist’s Culture Lab. Here’s a more relaxed version for Lem initiates:   Halfway through his epic cybernetic rewiring of the Western cultural project, at the top of his rhetorical … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[184,198,211,240,260],"class_list":["post-1054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-futurology","tag-irony","tag-lem","tag-philosophy","tag-satire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1054"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2442,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054\/revisions\/2442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}