Summa technologiae

435 Pages·2013·1.977 MB·English, Polish

by  Zylinska, Joanna, Lem, Stanisław

SUMMA TECHNOLOGIAE
ELECTRONIC MEDIATIONS
Katherine Hayles, Mark Poster, and Samuel Weber, Series Editors
40 SUMMA TECHNOLOGIAE
Stanisław Lem
39 DIGITAL MEMORY AND THE ARCHIVE
Wolfgang Ernst
38 HOW TO DO THINGS WITH VIDEOGAMES
Ian Bogost
37 NOISE CHANNELS: GLITCH AND ERROR IN DIGITAL CULTURE
Peter Krapp
36 GAMEPLAY MODE: WAR, SIMULATION, AND TECHNOCULTURE
Patrick Crogan
35 DIGITAL ART AND MEANING: READING KINETIC POETRY, TEXT MACHINES, MAPPING
ART, AND INTERACTIVE INSTALLATIONS
Roberto Simanowski
34 VILÉM FLUSSER: AN INTRODUCTION
Anke Finger, Rainer Guldin, and Gustavo Bernardo
33 DOES WRITING HAVE A FUTURE?
Vilém Flusser
32 INTO THE UNIVERSE OF TECHNICAL IMAGES
Vilém Flusser
31 HYPERTEXT AND THE FEMALE IMAGINARY
Jaishree K. Odin
30 SCREENS: VIEWING MEDIA INSTALLATION ART
Kate Mondloch
29 GAMES OF EMPIRE: GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND VIDEO GAMES
Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter
28 TACTICAL MEDIA
Rita Raley
27 RETICULATIONS: JEAN-LUC NANCY AND THE NETWORKS OF THE POLITICAL
Philip Armstrong
(continued on page 411)
SUMMA TECHNOLOGIAE
Stanisław Lem
translated by
Joanna Zylinska
Electronic Mediations
Volume 40
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Originally published in Polish in 1964 as Summa
technologiae by Wydawnictwo Literackie. Copyright
2000 Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków. Copyright 2010
Barbara Lem and Tomasz Lem. http://www.lem.pl.
English translation and Translator’s Introduction copyright
2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without
the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available
from the Library of Congress.
isbn 978-0-8166-7576-0 (hc)
isbn 978-0-8166-7577-7 (pb)
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-
opportunity educator and employer.
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION Evolution May Be
Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts, but It’s Not All
That Great: On Lem’s Summa Technologiae ix
Joanna Zylinska
SUMMA TECHNOLOGIAE
1. DILEMMAS 3
2. TWO EVOLUTIONS 11
Similarities 14
Differences 19
The First Cause 31
Several Naïve Questions 37
3. CIVILIZATIONS IN THE UNIVERSE 41
The Formulation of the Problem 41
The Formulation of the Method 43
The Statistics of Civilizations in the Universe 47
A Catastrophic Theory of the Universe 50
A Metatheory of Miracles 53
Man’s Uniqueness 57
Intelligence: An Accident or a Necessity? 60
Hypotheses 64
Votum Separatum 67
Future Prospects 71
4. INTELECTRONICS 77
Return to Earth 77
A Megabyte Bomb 81
The Big Game 85
Scientific Myths 89
The Intelligence Amplifier 93
The Black Box 96
The Morality of Homeostats 99
The Dangers of Electrocracy 103
Cybernetics and Sociology 107
Belief and Information 111
Experimental Metaphysics 118
The Beliefs of Electric Brains 125
The Ghost in the Machine 129
The Trouble with Information 132
Doubts and Antinomies 137
5. PROLEGOMENA TO OMNIPOTENCE 155
Before Chaos 155
Chaos and Order 159
Scylla and Charybdis: On Restraint 164
The Silence of the Designer 168
Methodological Madness 171
A New Linnaeus: About Systematics 176
Models and Reality 179
Plagiarism and Creation 183
On Imitology 186
6. PHANTOMOLOGY 191
The Fundamentals of Phantomatics 191
The Phantomatic Machine 195
Peripheral and Central Phantomatics 203
The Limits of Phantomatics 206
Cerebromatics 211
Teletaxy and Phantoplication 217
Personality and Information 221
7. THE CREATION OF WORLDS 235
Information Farming 237
Linguistic Engineering 267
The Engineering of Transcendence 282
Cosmogonic Engineering 288
8. A LAMPOON OF EVOLUTION 297
Reconstructing the Species 300
Constructing Life 307
Constructing Death 319
Constructing Consciousness 322
Error-based Constructs 327
Bionics and Biocybernetics 331
In the Eyes of the Designer 335
Reconstructing Man 346
Cyborgization 348
The Autoevolutionary Machine 351
Extrasensory Phenomena 354
CONCLUSION 359
NOTES 363
BIBLIOGRAPHY 401
INDEX 405

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
EVOLUTION MAY BE GREATER THAN THE SUM OF
ITS PARTS, BUT IT’S NOT ALL THAT GREAT:
ON LEM’S SUMMA TECHNOLOGIAE
JOANNA ZYLINSKA
Is the human a typical phenomenon in the Universe or an exceptional
one? Is there a limit to the expansion of a civilization? Would plagiariz-
ing Nature count as fraud? Is consciousness a necessary component of
human agency? Should we rather trust our thoughts or our perceptions?
Do we control the development of technology, or is technology control-
ling us? Should we make machines moral? What do human societies and
colonies of bacteria have in common? What can we learn from insects?
For answers to all these questions and more, Stanisław Lem’s Summa
Technologiae is undoubtedly the place to go.
Lem (1921–2006) is best known to English-speaking readers as
the author of the novel Solaris (1961), the film versions of which were
directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (Grand Prix at the 1972 Cannes Film
Festival) and Steven Soderbergh (2002). However, science fiction afi-
cionados all over the world have been reading Lem’s original and often
surprising novels—translated into over forty languages—for years. Be
that as it may, the Polish writer’s attitude to science fiction was not
unproblematic. Witness his spat with the Science Fiction and Fantasy
Writers of America association, which was incensed by Lem’s unabashed
critique of the majority of the works within the genre as unimaginative,
predictable, and focused on a rather narrow idea of the future. Lem’s
own novels take a rather different approach. Drawing on scientific
research, they are deeply philosophical speculations about technology,
time, evolution, and the nature (and culture) of humankind. What makes
Lem’s writings particularly distinct is his ironic writing style, which is
full of puns, jokes, and clever asides. Yet, on another level, his gripping
stories about space travel, alien life, and human enhancement are also
complex philosophical parables about human and nonhuman life in its
past, present, and future forms.
The philosophical ambition of Lem’s fiction is carried through to
what is probably his most accomplished and mature work: a treatise on
futurology, technology, and science called Summa Technologiae (1964).
With a title that is a pastiche of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae,
Lem erects a secular edifice of knowledge aimed at rivaling that of his
scholastic predecessor. His Summa sets out to investigate the premises
and assumptions behind the scientific concepts of the day and, in par-
ticular, the idea of technology that underpins them. As Lem writes in
the book’s opening pages: “I shall focus here on various aspects of our
civilization that can be guessed and deduced from the premises known
to us today, no matter how improbable their actualization. What lies
at the foundation of our hypothetical constructions are technologies,
i.e., means of bringing about certain collectively determined goals that
have been conditioned by the state of our knowledge and our social
aptitude—and also those goals that no one has identified at the outset.”
Despite having been written nearly fifty years ago, Summa has lost
none of its intellectual vigor or critical significance. Some specific scien-
tific debates may have advanced or been corrected since Lem published
Summa in 1964, yet it is actually surprising to see how many things he did
get right, or even managed to predict—from the limitations of the Search
for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program through to artificial in-
telligence, bionics, the theory of search engines (Lem’s “ariadnology”),
virtual reality (which he terms “phantomatics”), and nanotechnology.
However, it is in the multiple layers of its philosophical argument that
the ongoing importance of his book lies. Biophysicist Peter Butko, who
published an explicatory essay on Summa in 2006, describes the book
as “an all-encompassing philosophical discourse on evolution: not only
evolution of science and technology . . . but also evolution of life, human-
ity, consciousness, culture, and civilization.”1
Lem’s investigation into the parallel processes involved in biological
and technical evolution, and his exploration of the consequences of such
parallelism, provides an important philosophical and empirical founda-
tion for concepts that many media theorists use somewhat loosely today,
x TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION