Blanchot's "The Proper Use of Science Fiction" (1959)

Incredible analysis from Blanchot here. I regard him in this instance as intimating some of the concerns I touched on my 2 "carbon chauvinism" posts. But it also breathes new life into what I regard as the most interesting and enduring philosophical questions, in part because they touch on issues familiar to sociologists and anthropologists. I'm thinking here of systems theorists, along with the profane and the sacred as foregrounded in the writings of Durkheim, and "the liminal" as featured in the writings of Victor Turner. All it took was a PhD for me to shape up to this legacy as in some sense constituting a theory of creative action.

Then as now, the questions of interest to me: What is a system? How does it negotiate its inside/outside? What is transgression, and how can it be situated, if at all, with regard to conceptions of "other spaces"?  I wrote in my thesis something about Benjamin Noye's discussion of Bataille and "the summit", so it is clear today that I also need to revise my notes in order to come to terms with the meaning of "the limit" described by Blanchot in the passage to follow.

I'm taking off tomorrow, so I can't even begin to touch on Cyclonopedia, which derridata bequeathed to me yesterday...suffice to say, I'm intrigued by the discussion of "exteriority" in that book as well.

Shelving these concerns for the moment, let me just add [in Twitter mode here] that I'm intrigued by what I regard as an approximation of the "performative contradiction" I mentioned in my 2nd carbon chauvinism post (see the conclusion of this excerpt from Blanchot). In any case, clearly these are issues that every science fiction writer has to engage with at some stage, and I suspect the same might be said about the imaginative capacity of xenobiologists to make allowance for the possible existence of lifeforms that confound their existing taxonomies.

Whenever science fiction guides us through space and the future as in a beyond where we are puerilely detached from ourselves, it proves vulnerable to all the jibes that Marx reserved for religion and philosophy. It is curious to see with what simplicity the great myths of transcendence learn to survive in these hypothetical worlds consecrated to immanence: that is interesting, and disappointing as well. ...What would happen if man suddenly encountered a superior being? The most common, and, imaginatively speaking, most impressive solution consists in finding signs of superiority in the lowest forms of life- insects, larvae, microbes- something which cannot but recall to us an immense chapter of theology.  But here we clearly see the import of this way of inverting the problem: it is that the problem itself is absurd, it is that human consciousness will never be able to convince itself, upon discovering it, of a superiority of other species; for this is the characteristic feature of consciousness: because it is null and void, it is always equal to all that is, the biggest and the smallest. Man is the summit- virtual or real, it little matters which. The idea of God, the idea of the microcosm, are only translations of this impossibility of consciousness being, in itself, inferior to that of which it is conscious. There thus remains only the trap of those species said to be inferior: if we admit, indeed, that among the beings known to us there are some that are ontologically beneath us, that means that they are just as much above us: these are truly our gods, and the literature of the fantastic makes use of this revelation in order to astound us for a moment. But the dramatic core of such visions remains this: man [sic] can never encounter a being superior to himself; this means that he will always be superior to everything, given that such superiority constitutes precisely the limit he tries in vain to surpass....

Carbon Chauvinism

Reading the various astrosociology manifestos yesterday, a few other conjunctions started to occur to me. What will happen when/if astrosociology starts becoming more attentive to astrobiological concerns? (to some extent this blog draws impetus from both sociological/biological concerns) Uncovering new astrobiological lifeforms would most likely be the precursor to later colonisation of alien worlds, followed by terraforming. This raises a whole swag of ethical questions.

By way of an instructive example, I've read Robinson's Mars Trilogy, and like ahuthnance, was appreciative of the representation of the indigenous Martians. The colonists are seemingly not aware of a lifeform so exotic that it escapes detection by their traditional methods of collecting specimens for the sake of arranging them into scientific taxonomies. Of course, there are "Green" colonists who favour terraforming with some qualification, and Robinson attempts to portray a viable "Blue" political compromise between "Red" and "Green" factions.

Looking then at Robinson's colonists, it is apparent that there were varying degrees of "carbon chauvinism" among the groups, insofar as there was divided opinion as to whether they could know where to search for xenobiological lifeforms; and by extension, whether it was still worth attempting to make some allowance for them in regard to space probe and mission planning. What kind of a philosophical conceptual vocabulary would be required then to do justice to the possible existence of such truly "alien" life forms? I'm wondering if so-called "speculative realism" presents as a suitable candidate, at least to the extent it may foreground the significance of, "non human worlds, by the interactions of dust mites in a carpet as much as by the dark sides of planets on which no human foot will ever tread". I regard it as equally important though to also consider the willingness of its adherents to nominate the appropriate circumstances under which "no human foot will ever tread" must become more prescriptive in tone .i.e. "no human foot should ever tread".

If this happened, what kind of a politics could be licensed? To my mind the possible answers sound a lot like the "astro" version of Deep Ecology, as portrayed by Robinson (as distinct from the positions held by many who would quite consciously identify themselves as astrobiologists, as distinct from xenobiologists, who are their Deep Ecology methodological relatives). Another concern is how a practitioner of "speculative realism" such as Graham Harman displays an elective affinity in his thought with actor network theory, some of the inherent problems of which (i.e. of ANT, not Harman specifically) have already been discussed elsewhere on this blog. Notwithstanding his stated differences from Latour et al (as referred to in the above piece on speculative realism), my principal concern in each case is the implicit downsizing of human agency. To what end should we be willing to adopt such a working assumption? So, if astrosociologists wish to ask such appropriately social scientific questions of these philosophers, it might be wise to follow some of the guidelines in my earlier post on Mark Bold.

In other words, I am attempting to foreground the significance of astrosociology as a sociology of anticipation: will we see a time in which it becomes necessary for astrosociologists, astrobiologists (along with xenobiologists), to sit down with "speculative realists" to discuss possibilities together? Harman refers to "the open" in his discussion of the future, and I am wondering if it may eventually be circumscribed by the kinds of scenarios described in Peter Dickens et al's book, The Cosmic Society (already anticipated to a certain extent by Robinson's fiction). Afterall, Harman appears to be ascribing a potentially contestatory power to "the open":

"neither Bhaskar nor DeLanda quite solve the problem with their colourful mist of catalysts and multiple causal factors. The complexity of such factors may lie beyond our own understanding, but not beyond that of a deity or a malevolent supercomputer. Some new approach is required to find openness amidst the turmoil of linear causes".

Until this approach materializes, I can at least amuse myself with this short adaptation of Terry Bisson's Nebula Award nominated story, They're Made Out of Meat. Although the story has inspired philosophical reflections on "carbon chauvinism" in its own right, (as some quick crossreferencing on Wikipedia will confirm), at present I have no knowledge of dialogues taking place with the recent school of "speculative realism", letalone earlier thinkers such as Carl Sagan (who laid some philosophical foundations for diagnosing "carbon chauvinism").